Azure Features for Startups

For my cloud service that I founded I decided to use Windows Azure as my cloud platform of choice. The service I created with my partner staxmanade is called Resgrid, and it’s a cloud based service for first responder organizations to manage personnel, units, departments and logistics.

My primary reason for choosing Azure was the price, coupled with BizSpark Program I have almost no out of pocket expenses for Azure for the first 3 years.

My secondary reason was my existing familiarity with the Microsoft development stack, but given the wide range of support for non-MS technologies I probably would have still chosen Azure based on the price.

My third reason, was the massive feature set that Azure provides. In one place I can get PaaS, IaaS, Mobile Support, Database, ESB and much more.

I found this original table on http://www.theworkflowelement.com/2013/02/feature-comparison-azure-and-amazon-from-10000-feet.html, really nice compilation of what Azure has compared to AWS. Their table was a little old, so I updated a little but with some Jan 1 2014 information.

All credit goes to TheWorkFlowElement for the initial table. This is by no means complete, but just a quick overview of what Azure offers and why it’s another reason I feel it’s good for startups needs to keep provider creep to a minimum.

If I missed anything or made a mistake just let me know and I’ll get it fixed. When you look at it, it’s clear, at least to me, that Amazon looks more positioned to larger scale more power computing. Unless you expect your startup to reach Netflix style scale right away, or at least in the first 3 years, Azure should be able to handle the load easily. By then they may match Amazon’s scale, i.e. 32 cores, 244GB of RAM style scaling.

The virtual or horizontal scaling offered by Amazon is very attractive and will be something I’ll be keeping an eye on in the future. But as a developer being able to Git push deploy to Azure Websites, or have Azure pick up a deployment from a TFS server is very nice. As a startup we have to keep our friction down to an absolute minimum, the time we spend on issues like that, long deployments or writing documentation and troubleshooting issues is time we can’t spend developing our product, marketing or interacting with customers.

To that end here at Resgrid we have our deployments to Staging and Production environment’s fully automated via deployments from TeamCity using Powershell. Our TeamCity server also CI’s all of our code, so with a couple of button presses we can fully deploy our system, (6 workers and a database) without much hassle.

All in all, I’m very happy with Azure as our startup choice and I feel that this is where it’s best positioned. For Netflix, Facebook, etc style scale I still think Amazon is the winner. But maybe in a couple of years Azure will get there and there will be some good use cases for us to see.