Over the last few weeks I have been testing out Microsoft’s “cloud” based database service called SQL Azure and I have to say it is quite impressive so far.

Although lacking in full MS SQL server features (no reporting services available yet) it has proven to be reliable, fast and a very short learning curve for those already familiar with SQL Server. All good so far then.

There are some immediate blockers you may come across if you are going to build web-based apps and host them in Microsoft’s cloud…

1) You need Windows 7 at least, you cannot build or deploy asp.net apps using XP as it has a reliance on IIS7.

2) You need SQL 2008 R2 Management Studio to connect to your instance of SQL Azure.

As you probably know SQL Azure databases are currently limited to either 1GB or 10GB sizes but this will be increasing to 50GB as Microsoft enhance the Azure platform over the coming months. You can keep an eye on the SQL Azure Team Blog and Twitter pages to keep up with SQL Azure as it evolves….the links are…

1) http://twitter.com/SQLAzure

2) http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/ 

There are a number of self learning labs and training courses on the SQL Azure Team blog and there is also a free web-based training course run by Microsoft UK starting Monday 10th May (webcasts will be recorded incase you miss the start). Details here … http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/04/20/register-now-for-the-uk-windows-azure-self-paced-interactive-learning.aspx 

Microsoft have certainly got off to a good start with SQL Azure. It is very easy to set up an azure account, create a database, copy over any data to it (you can use BCP, SSIS) and then just connect to the database in the same way you would to your current on-premise SQL Server.

 There are lots of things to consider about using SQL Azure in production as it is not suitable for everyone or every application. But having made it a small jump to get started with SQL Azure it makes it easy for you to figure that out for yourself.

Here is another good blog post from another persons experience of SQL Azure… http://www.keepitsimpleandfast.com/2010/01/my-first-experiences-with-sql-azure-sql.html

I just finished reading a new book on Cloud Computing called “Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud” by George Reece. If you are looking for a concise overview of cloud computing and the Amazon Cloud Infrastructure (EC2, S3 etc) then it is worth a read. It leans towards the technical side more than just being an executive summary.

I am sceptical about cloud computing becoming as prevalent as the marketing buzz says.

What is the core selling point? The “cloud” can provide massive scalability in terms of computing power. But this is only applicable for those very few companies who need to scale very quickly on an ongoing basis or perhaps just periodically, just like Amazon does.

Amazon has massive traffic coming to their sites and has huge peaks around holiday seasons. They need to be able to scale quickly. They don’t want to invest hugely in IT just so they can accommodate the peak demand. This would leave underutilised computing capacity during the non-peaks. Have they now just come up with a great way of selling their spare capacity and profiting on providing additional capacity beyond that? Remember that Amazon were the leaders in cloud computing before other vendors followed them.

Most companies don’t need this scalability. In fact it would be easier, and cheaper (currently), to use a managed hosted server rather than the cloud options from Amazon.

The “cloud” is also very unreliable. If you set up some virtual servers on Amazons cloud infrastructure you have to plan for these to fail, they absolutely will fail and more often than a physical server in your data centre. Now you have a whole new learning curve.

My list of major concerns for Cloud Computing:

• More Expensive
• Less Reliable (this can be mitigated but there is a large learning curve, do you need another layer of complexity in maintaining and developing systems?)
• Security is a major issue that needs to be planned for
• Little or no portability between the different cloud vendors (lack of standards)
• Licencing issues. Not all software vendors have licencing options for scenarios where you are using their software in the cloud (per hour licencing versus per server licencing)

Lets see how cloud computing evolves…