Hmm, according to this page:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

The cheapest server (compute+database) is $100/month.

That can't be right, surely? Is there really no intermediate pricing? What am I missing?

Azure's pricing seem optimized either for medium to big sites (who need more than 2 front-end servers, hence would benefit from the per-hour pricing) or for agencies that will host multiple sites on the same server. Also, Azure is more "managed" than AWS or Linode. That is, you just write your application code and push it to the servers. There's no sysadmin work to do, nothing to install and configure but your own code.

Cheapest is actually $39.99. For some reason, that pricing calculator doesn't give the option for the extra small compute size, which is $30 a month. Check out this link which has more detail:

https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/advanc...

Azure is not as cheap as most hosting; especially since if you want to stay up during failover you need more than one instance.

Would love to see RavenDB http://ravendb.net/ supported in the same way as MongoDB.

When mongodb is open source, hence free, I don't see a reason why they would add ravendb.

Now give me PostgreSQL and redis and I'm going to use this.

Given the developer/community response to the redis windows patch a few days back, I am not sure that would ever make it on to the windows platform (at least in its canonical form).

I don't want a merge, but at the same time I and people inside VMware used some time in the latest days to figure how a good win32 port could be feasible... so I think the biggest limit so far is that there are not enough efforts on the win32 port to make it viable, and not me or the community ;)

I guess you'll have to wait a bit. Azure VMs don't have a persistent file system yet; and the Azure Drive is not quite a reasonable alternative.

The SQL Federation feature is pretty awesome. Is there anyone else offering a managed RDBMS with built in sharding capabilities?

Good news. More competition is always welcomed. Hopefully this put pricing pressure on other cloud vendors.

I don't see any of my sites moving there until they start offering Linux nodes, which will, in all certainty, never happen.

How does it deal with autoscaling? If, for some reason, some property goes viral and starts to get too much traffic, what will it do?

> until they start offering Linux nodes, which will, in all certainty, never happen.

I wouldn't be too sure - it is a serious gap in their offering, and MS can be pragmatic if it's to their advantage.

> How does it deal with autoscaling?

It doesn't, you've to do it yourself. What they do is make it (relatively) easy to spin-up new instances. There are also tools/frameworks that automate some of the tasks.

> MS can be pragmatic if it's to their advantage.

That's one point. I can't imagine any circumstance in which this would be advantageous to them.

> What they do is make it (relatively) easy to spin-up new instances.

Cool. Sometimes you are gifted with an application that will only run on Windows and nothing else.

When life gives you lemons, get salt and tequila.