When Microsoft first announced its Azure cloud computing platform, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Was Microsoft just trying to jump on a buzzword bandwagon, or is the cloud computing paradigm really enterprise ready?
Once Azure was released in a ready-to-use form, I read some information about it, but very little of it was aimed at someone like me who did not know the fundamentals. And unfortunately, Microsoft has formed a really bad habit of putting useful information into online videos… as if anyone who works for a living has time to sit through three or four hour-long videos without even being sure if the video really contains the information that they need. All the same, I was able to wade through enough of the available information to find out what Windows Azure is and the basic concepts behind developing for it.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=2671
The Azure platform looks like an interesting choice if you’re a .NET developer, although I don’t know how the pricing stacks up compared to other services. I think that Azure would definitely be a good choice for things like batch processing (say, running reports, unit tests, integration tests, etc.) where it can be put under a heavy load and scaled down, and the SLA concerns are not a major issue.