[TheMonarch]

Using it for my blog, and planning to use for my company's site soon. We'll have 2-3 web roles, SQL Azure, and possibly 2 worker roles in the future. Table storage for logging, and blob storage for cached versions of custom minification and bundling process, as well as for thousands of images.

It's very nice that you can define your app and then assign resources to it after the fact. As long as designed properly from the start to support this model things seem to work really well.

My main gripes about it are the limitations of SQL Azure -- no cross db joins, mysterious performance throttling. Federations seems like a KILLER feature, but for it's own limitations (no cross-db again, and no support for something like distributed/partitioned views, because the partitioning basically has to be determined at the application level). I want this scale out feature to take place at the database level if possible, the way partitioned views do in SQL Server Enterprise Edition. DO I really want to manually handle fan-out queries to make sure that no two users get the same user name? No.

I'm hoping they will improve the SQL Azure story in 2013 because it could mean the difference for myself and people I know of moving only some apps to Azure vs. moving everything.