I'm considering using Azure atm & would love to hear some opinions/limitations. Initial reading is suggesting there will be a lot of configuration to get things going.
My first recommendation is to get into the BizSpark program. It will give you an MSDN account and a nice chunk of free Azure Hours every month and (I think) 3 1gb Sql Azure databases.
Our company deals with lots of data and real-time responses so we push many of the existing features to their limits. We haven't really had any blockers that didn't have some sort of reasonable work around. And most of the time the next release of features will eliminate a good chunk of those.
We're pretty lucky in that we're part of Microsoft' early adopter programs and get to peek at some features coming down the pipe soon. There is some awesome stuff coming, but of course we're under NDA.
There are some extra things to consider but they are more a result of using the Cloud in general. For example, it highly recommended that you add retry logic into your code which makes sql queries. This is because your data is triple replicated and fail overs or db moves can drop your pooled connections.
Also as I mentioned in my other comment. There are some limits to Table Storage which you need to account for or you'll find yourself stuck and frustrated. Things like Count,GroupBy,Joins,Distinct,etc are not available. For those familiar with NoSql db then this is no surprise. But if you're a hardcore relation guy like I was then this takes getting used to.
We're pretty happy with our decision to use Azure.
Our company deals with lots of data and real-time responses so we push many of the existing features to their limits. We haven't really had any blockers that didn't have some sort of reasonable work around. And most of the time the next release of features will eliminate a good chunk of those.
We're pretty lucky in that we're part of Microsoft' early adopter programs and get to peek at some features coming down the pipe soon. There is some awesome stuff coming, but of course we're under NDA.
There are some extra things to consider but they are more a result of using the Cloud in general. For example, it highly recommended that you add retry logic into your code which makes sql queries. This is because your data is triple replicated and fail overs or db moves can drop your pooled connections.
Also as I mentioned in my other comment. There are some limits to Table Storage which you need to account for or you'll find yourself stuck and frustrated. Things like Count,GroupBy,Joins,Distinct,etc are not available. For those familiar with NoSql db then this is no surprise. But if you're a hardcore relation guy like I was then this takes getting used to.
We're pretty happy with our decision to use Azure.