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.
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.
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.
