Microsoft’s Azure

PaaS (Platform as a Service). That’s the niche that Microsoft is targeting. Developers, popular languages, especially one of our old favorites here, the ultra-powerful PHP. Last year we got the opportunity to work with a Microsoft team on their PHP/IIS optimization engine. Unfortunately, we were much too busy and it was much too buggy.

For us to recommend Microsoft’s PaaS product, which really sounds pretty neat, would require them to drop their complicated and sketchy pricing antics. “$0.12 per compute hour” is not something we can explain to our clients and we’re not even clear what Microsoft would call a “compute hour” and how we could audit this ourselves. We owe it to our clientele to investigate this further.  So far they’ve already raised an eyebrow here with their “free until November” slogan. Ideally, once they stop imitating AOL’s model from the 1990s, they’ll sell this thing like a hosting package and drop their “compute hour” nonsense. For now, we call this experimental, at best.

Please do help us to keep the record straight, agree or disagree.