I’m truly thrilled by the thought. This gives me great possibilities. As an entrepreneur, I get loads of ideas. My biggest pain is always how to deploy this. Funding is a big issue, and this leads to compromises in server infrastructure and stuff. As a developer, I’m not that much focused on servers and thing alike, so to have a big platform is an advantage.

At PDC2008, they showcased a mobile app called Bluehoo. On stage, by editing an XML file online he scaled his platform from 1 to 20 nodes to be capable of the upcoming load due to the the announcement made at PDC.

My thoughts on pros:

• Great scalability
• Large content network = low latency around the world
• Consolidation
• Pay as you go premise – compared to buying hardware upfront
• Easy application maturing – developing locally, deploying to a staging environment before deploying to production

Cons:

• The inevitable: “What will they do with my data?”
• Dependency on Microsoft
• Unawareness – like deploying your app to ‘a black box’

On the Windows Azure site, the links to SDK’s and VS2008 tools are broken. They should be good shortly!

Update: For more information on Windows Azure, check out this blog post at Channel 10.

Or this: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1671