[luffy]

It's best to look at it like most of Microsoft version 1 products - it's going to be painful to use. But it has tons of potential - more so than any product in recent memory. And it's actually pretty reasonably priced, even if you aren't in BizSpark.

You really don't need to worry about roles that much. A web role is a website, and a worker role is a non-website service (though you can connect to a worker role via http). In theory, load balancing his handled for you so you can achieve redundancy with at least two instances.

Now, there are some real painful points with azure as it stands. My two two specific points are these: deploying takes a long time - some times over 10 minutes. So forget about agile build processes or continuous deployment or even making a quick, simple text change.

The other major problem I have is you have to run the debugger to get access to the development storage ( blob & tables). Both of these are really useful. But running the debugger all the time is torture.

Developer tools are hugely important to all of the MS ecosystem, and I bet these concerns get addressed - this is the big advantage for moving ScottGu over to the azure team. Azure is a big part of the future of that company.

[smhinsey]

You don't have to run to the debugger to get dev storage, just start it separately. It should put something in your start menu like Storage Emulator. It varies with version.