[efiftythree]

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft uses this to push their PaaS offerings. All too often people jump into cloud services with IaaS whereas the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services like Azure Storage (various types), HDInsight (Hadoop), and Azure Machine Learning.

[aceperry]

"the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services"

How do you figure that? Pricing on cloud services can be tough to compare so I really question anyone who presents blanket statements like that.

[efiftythree]

I probably shouldn't have used such a initiative word like "will". That said scaling out PaaS compared to scaling out IaaS, specifically on Azure, is almost guaranteed to be less expensive from an infrastructure standpoint. Less actual VM's to manage also translates into less overhead from maintenance activities.

At the very least it will be interesting to see if more people adopt the Azure Websites PaaS offering. I know that right now most people dip their toes into Azure with IaaS because its historically more comfortable for them.