I'm using it, because they give me €150,- in credits each month because I'm enrolled in BizSpark.
I'm a bit torn. I like Azure, the interface is much nicer than other cloud providers in my opinion, the hosted SQL works well for my needs, being able to run for free is very nice...
I'm loving the grouped SQL billing. Basicly, instead of paying seperately for each SQL database you host, you can pool all of your databases together and they'll share a billing pool. So, if one of your customers needs less performance and the other happens to use more, there's no change in what you pay.
But I have encountered stability and speed issues, especially in the beginning. Not on the VM's themselves, mind you, just in the management side of things.
Most of these issues seem to stem from the backends, the frontend is pretty slick but it can only do so much when the response time of backends is so slow. Also, it's a bit ridiculous to get an unknown error when you try to add an endpoint to a firewall, because the previous endpoint operation (Adding a different endpoint) was still in progress.
Nowadays it seems to have stabilized and improved a lot and I'm hopeful it will continue to get better.
When I had an msdn they gave me £100 a month free or something - which was super cool. With that I was able to run a lovely minecraft server for me and a couple friends :)
Comments
I'm using it, because they give me €150,- in credits each month because I'm enrolled in BizSpark.
I'm a bit torn. I like Azure, the interface is much nicer than other cloud providers in my opinion, the hosted SQL works well for my needs, being able to run for free is very nice... I'm loving the grouped SQL billing. Basicly, instead of paying seperately for each SQL database you host, you can pool all of your databases together and they'll share a billing pool. So, if one of your customers needs less performance and the other happens to use more, there's no change in what you pay.
But I have encountered stability and speed issues, especially in the beginning. Not on the VM's themselves, mind you, just in the management side of things. Most of these issues seem to stem from the backends, the frontend is pretty slick but it can only do so much when the response time of backends is so slow. Also, it's a bit ridiculous to get an unknown error when you try to add an endpoint to a firewall, because the previous endpoint operation (Adding a different endpoint) was still in progress.
Nowadays it seems to have stabilized and improved a lot and I'm hopeful it will continue to get better.
When I had an msdn they gave me £100 a month free or something - which was super cool. With that I was able to run a lovely minecraft server for me and a couple friends :)