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I'm getting close to finishing a public-facing ASP.Net app and I'm starting to weigh deployment options. I'm an ASP.Net/SQLServer veteran but noob when it comes to Azure. I'm wondering how others have felt about the learning curve to effectively migrate a local dev ASP.Net/SQLServer apps into Azure cloud.

More specifically:

  1. How steep is the learning curve towards understanding administration and programming concepts, and do you think it's worth the investment?

  2. What is Microsoft's support like if I have catastrophic problems from my cloud infrastructure and my live site is down? My expectation is a large price tag for a not-so-urgent SLA.

  3. Will my non-Azure ASP.Net app require significant modification and/or coupling to run in the Azure environment?

Thanks

sisdog
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4 Answers4

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My personal experience is that there isn't much documentation and you have to search through blogs / forums to find answers for more advanced questions. If you have a nicely design app then there shouldn't be much problem with porting - you can google for Azure version of ASP.NET providers, ie. membership.

The biggest disadvantage may be cost: you have to do your maths but for me it turned out that a VPS hosting is much cheaper than Azure.

I would say that unless you get considerable savings on infrastructure don't move to Azure for just the sake of doing it. A hosted server with SQL and IIS will give you less problems and a bit more freedom.

Jakub Konecki
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    Isn't much documentation??? Blog posts are being churned out daily by both Microsoft and the development community. There's a 12-part Azure series on iTunes and Zune. There's dozens of video training segments on http://www.msdev.com. There are free Azure Bootcamps nationwide (http://www.azurebootcamp.com). Azure MVPs blog frequently - see http://azure.snagy.name/blog/?p=317 for a list. Search for #azure on twitter and you'll see the overabundance of blogs, information, tips, etc. – David Makogon Feb 01 '11 at 00:54
  • Thats what I mean - you have to relay on blogs. I was looking on Azure a year ago and there the information for, as I said, *advanced* topics was hard to find. Maybe it changed now... – Jakub Konecki Feb 01 '11 at 08:14
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I answered a similar question a while back, here. Azure has evolved since then:

Azure's AppFabric Cache is currently in CTP (community technology preview) and will go live some time later this year (sorry, I can't quote a date). With a single configuration change, you'll be able to enable the asp.net session state provider without changing any code, and have your session state available to all of your web role instances.

With Azure v1.3 which rolled out in November, you have have the ability to run tasks at startup with elevated privileges (e.g. to run an MSI to install some prerequisite control suite).

For monitoring, you can take advantage of Microsoft System Center, which now supports Azure directly. Alternatively, you can look into 3rd-party options such as AzureWatch.

With Azure's extra-small instance, you can run a site for approx. $44 monthly. You mentioned catastrophic failures and SLA. With Azure, you need a minimum of two instances for SLA to take effect (this is because your virtual machines are located in physically different areas of the data center, in separate fault domains). So you're looking at approx. $90 / month to run a site with 99.95% uptime. Only you can determine whether this is worth it to you. Yes, you can host with a simple hosting provider for significantly less (such as GoDaddy). However, if your site fails there, you have to wait for it to be detected and then installed on a separate box. Also, you share each server with potentially dozens of other tenants, which will impact your site's performance. With Azure, at most 8 tenants will occupy a box, depending on how many cores you configure your virtual machines to use. And it's incredibly simple to scale up or down to handle traffic increases and decreases.

Community
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David Makogon
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  • High availability is going to be key for me so I might bite the bullet and start off with two VM's. My whole worry here is having to stop what I'm doing for a week and immersing myself in learning "the platform". I know I'll have to do it but there's just an avalanche of info sources out there and I'm trying to see if it's worth it before I start. – sisdog Feb 01 '11 at 20:32
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I see an excellent answer by David Makogon already. The following might be helpful for you as well. The last episode of the Connected Show podcast was about migrating Wold Maps to Azure. If you are considering moving to Azure it is certainly worth listening to, as they explain the challenges they faced during the migration.

santiagoIT
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You could give a look at Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform in MSDN.

Cheers.

vtortola
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