Azure.. Love it or hate it's here

So what is Azure??

This post I thought I'd share what Azure is and what it is good for. Azure has become a new Windows buzz word that is all over the internet with little explanation, so here it goes.

Azure is Microsoft's attempt at taking hardware from the Data center and placing it into the cloud. So what does this mean? This means that the Software Engineer and IT team no longer have to worry about things like SQL server and Windows server set up. This is all done within the cloud. Obviously there are pros and like there is with everything else. It's kind of like when host providers started to host websites. Same thing. The process of building the web server ( memory, hard drive space and such), as well as getting upload bandwidth speeds to handle the amount of traffic you hope to get is placed in the hands of the hosting provider. Providers such as go daddy or network solutions. Azure takes the same hosting concepts and applies them to software / database development. An excellent place to start to discover the benefits to this new Microsoft platform is this website: Learn about Azure

Who is this good for and why?

Azure is good for a wide range of people for a variety of reasons. Even if you are a bigger company, you still can utilize the power of Azure with the power of lack of knowledge so to speak. You software development team can spend less time worrying about the set up of SQL or setting up Windows server and more time on the project at hand. On the downside this also gives the company less control and thus can cause issues where there are complicated scenarios with things like permissions and such.
A lot of this in the end will depend on how well Microsoft support is and how the handle companies needs. I'm sure it will no doubt be support based on a big fat monetary scale.