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I woke up very early this morning and headed off to the 5:45 am spinning class I’ve attended 3-4 mornings a week since September.  When I’m spinning, I usually put business and the pressures of the world out of my mind and concentrate on the workout.  Not this morning.  My head is in the cloud. Think Azure.

Last night, Allan Naim gave an excellent presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on what Microsoft is doing with Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Azure Marketplace.  Allan’s role at Microsoft is Architect Evangelist for Windows Azure.

As Allan said, Microsoft is “all in”.  They have 30,000 people working on their cloud, and cloud-based software.  New releases of many products are going to the cloud first, and then moved on premise.  He acknowledged that there are some areas where they haven’t hit the nail on the head, but it’s clear they’re listening to developers, and to the enterprise.

Allan laid out eight scenarios where we can benefit from putting our applications and/or data into the cloud. His scenarios include apps that fit one or more of the following characteristics:

• Massive scale
• High reliability
• Variable load
• Short or unpredictable lifetime
• Parallel processing
• Must fail fast or scale fast
• Doesn’t fit well in an organization’s data center
• Can benefit from external storage

I believe Microsoft is “all in,” and for good reason.  This is a real battleground, and their competitors are looking for ways to beat them.  There are cases where the cloud isn’t right, but there are more and more scenarios where our clients can reap big benefits from the cloud, specifically Windows Azure.

Check out Allan’s terrific Cloud Computing blog on MSDN.

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