Microsoft’s vision of a Windows-only cloud is ambitious, but too many features are currently still in beta

Windows Azure runs programs and stores data, and is used in the context of roles that are similar to how Windows Server thinks of roles. Today, using Microsoft’s Visual Studio or development suites like Eclipse, you can develop code to run with an IIS Web interface, or background Worker Roles which do not use IIS.

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We tested Web and Worker Roles along with the SQL Azure Role using a Microsoft Developer Network blog-recommended implementation of WordPress blogging software into the Azure cloud. The process used a Web Role that accessed Azure storage and used SQL Azure — with the well-known WordPress blogging app.

We installed WordPress using Visual Studio Express to create our WordPress Website. After we created a Windows Azure Web Role as an Azure project, we had to add the php SQL Server library, the Azure PHP SDK, php and WordPress files all in the Visual Studio project. We reacquainted ourselves with the hell of configuration files.

All worked fine until an upgrade demanded a reboot of the instance. Then we discovered that NTFS local storage isn’t guaranteed to be persistent, although Windows Azure Drives and BLOBs are. Indeed our storage disappeared as we’d mistakenly chosen NTFS local storage — after we rebooted the instance.

The Azure Web Role WordPress application we used ran within a “medium” Windows Server 2008 instance with two cores at 1.6GHz with 3.5GB of RAM with 490GB of disk space. It costs $0.24 per hour for the instance (not including the SQL Azure costs, which vary per database from $9.95 to $499.95 per month
Summary

Azure has a delightful product roadmap, filled with interesting plans. Today, its practical production value is weak—given all of the pieces that are missing. It’s a huge and complex endeavor, fraught with licensing issues, feature issues, and gotchas. In the PaaS model, it’s currently Windows 2008/ 2008 R2-specific, and its licensing model is somewhat draconian.