Steve Marx (@smarx) rustled up a live chat this evening (9pm my time) between some people on the development team and us developers out in the wild. It was an interesting opportunity to hear from the Azure team and other developers that are looking at Azure. Steve will post his opinions and (maybe) the transcript to his blog, but I thought you may be interested in some of my takeaways.
It seems that Microsoft is looking at ways to provide some sort of free Azure capacity with mentions of using the Bizspark programmes (and a hint that others). While not the same free as GAE, I suppose they will at least have a better idea who their customers are rather than a free-for-all. the point is that business and developers will be able to get on board easily and try out their ideas.
There was lively discussion on how to sell Azure to business and it seems that developers are battling to get managers to understand what is so cool about Azure and why they should start a project. It looks like developers that are active (the people of the chat) are looking for some help from Microsoft to convince their managers.
It seems that the porting of existing apps was highlighted in the survey as being a barrier to entry and the discussion quickly moved into data. It is no surprise that handling of data is the most obvious component that developers see as being different and more complex to port. There seems to be a camp that is waiting for SQL Azure and a camp that wants the storageclient sorted out (easier to work with and better tooling). I made my point heard that they should get Pablo Castro (of Astoria fame) to sort out the storage API, and promised a case of beer if he can do it over a weekend :).
The Azure team hinted that they were looking into providing some sort of mapreduce functionality – generating a flurry of questions. It is good to see the team taking on more cloudy patterns.
Steve asked about the deployment experience and the response was generally positive. Apparently exposing of a management API will be available by RTM, which is great, as well as some profiling scenarios to help with debugging of deployed apps.
It also seems that they have roped in Patterns and Practices (P&P) to do some documentation of architectural guidance. They have been producing good quality recently and having them churning out stuff for Azure will definitely be a good thing.
Those are the highlights that I picked up, Steve will no doubt have more on his blog (blog.smarx.com) soon. It was good to see that there is a community building up around Azure already (@dlambert, @WadeWegner, @rogerjenn were there) and although 60 people chatting (text only) at once was a bit difficult to follow it seemed to work well enough and was a success considering that it was organized hastily.
Thanks Steve for setting it up.
Simon Munro
@simonmunro