>"Hate on Microsoft all you want but this is a great thing. If Microsoft feels they want to play in the infrastructure as a service game they need to earn the customer's trust."
Interestingly, the folks I deal with some folks who run some large-scale Microsoft services for a living want nothing to do with Azure in its current state and use AWS instead.
Apparently, Azure lacks some pretty basic functionality like the ability to bind multiple addresses to an instance [0] and makes running legacy versions of Windows a pain - deal breakers for production and test purposes.
On the other hand Azure has some awesome features not available in AWS. For example you can upgrade an Azure instance to a bigger size with zero downtime.
Out of curiosity, why would you need to bind an arbitrary IP to a VM? What's wrong with the one it's presumably got?
I know some places can move IPs around at will, but it seems like the wrong layer in the stack to do it. Aren't IPs something you want to assign based on your network topology? If you need an arbitrary identifier that can move between machines, what's wrong with DNS? (And how are you not re-inventing DNS?) (and the names are more memorable)
If you do have the capability to do this, does it not tie you to that provider? Presumably the IPs would be allocated to the provider, so switching to a new provider would necessitate a new IP, whereas DNS addresses can point anywhere.
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding (I've never tried these shenanigans with IPs), so please correct me if I am.
Some DNS clients ignore the TTL, or have their own minimums.
One of the worst offenders, ironically, is Microsoft's own Windows XP which is notorious for having a minimum TTL of 10 minutes, forcing people away from DNS as a means of failover.
Strikes me that this is intentional, not some thing that they are structurally incapable of doing - it is not as if there is a massive engineering effort for example, to support such a thing.
Never the less, I am in the same boat as your friends in many cases. In my consulting practice I do lots of SQL Server tuning work and have found very few cases where I can tell a client that going to Azure would be a net benefit for the database. Even with the new dedicated SQL instances, on-premise will almost always get you more perf per dollar. (though the Azure stuff does come with less maintenance headaches in theory)
Interestingly, the folks I deal with some folks who run some large-scale Microsoft services for a living want nothing to do with Azure in its current state and use AWS instead.
Apparently, Azure lacks some pretty basic functionality like the ability to bind multiple addresses to an instance [0] and makes running legacy versions of Windows a pain - deal breakers for production and test purposes.
0: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/en-US/d... "At this time we have nothing we can disclose regarding the timeframe to support multiple IPs on Azure VMs."