

EBay and Microsoft Announce Cloud Computing Agreement - bjonathan
http://ebayinkblog.com/2010/07/12/breaking-ebay-and-microsoft-announce-cloud-computing-agreement-wpc10/

======
vyrotek
As someone who also has a company built on Azure, this is great news. I'm
happy to see Azure gain some serious traction.

~~~
elblanco
How has your experience been with Azure? I've been looking at a few solutions
for a possible new company and haven't really seen it on anybody's radar yet.

~~~
vyrotek
We've had a great experience so far. Our company leverages their Queues and
Worker Roles for our event processing.

Our biggest challenge was deciding between SqlServer or Table Storage. We were
already familiar and comfortable with the 'relational' way of doing things in
SqlServer but we knew we would scale past the storage limits pretty quick. So
we decided to jump into the world of denormalized-key/value systems. Luckily,
.Net lets you use LINQ with Table Storage and makes querying for your data
VERY easy. The biggest 'gotchas' were when we realized that aggregate
functions like COUNT, SUM, DISTINCT were not supported (yet?). But, we did
find ways to leverage the schemaless nature of the tables to our advantage.

Deploying/Updating our ASP.Net MVC Web Application and multiple Workers is now
a one click process.

------
mkramlich
of the big ecommerce sites Ebay always struck me as the one most likely to
involve Microsoft. something about their culture, at least near the top.

~~~
minouye
And the fact that using anything Amazon is pretty much off the table...

~~~
mkramlich
good point! i hadn't considered that. yeah and they might also be afraid to
host anything with Google, the other big cloud-ish behemoth out there. unless
they thought it desirable and likely to be bought by them, etc.

