Moving to Azure

Today, I moved my small application to Azure. Rarely have I been this excited. Azure reminds me of the days when I was fifteen and Netscape Navigator was just released. I spend nights in my friend's place browsing the web with a 14kbps modem and a 486. The internet was nothing it is today, but it was exciting.

In my professional career, I have had to run dozens of times to a server facility, installing new servers, putting out fires on existing ones and so on. I have used multiple different customer VPN connections to different server environments, each with its own peculiarities. The hardware costs are reasonable, but the management burden is getting out of control as the business grows. The worst thing is that the quality of system administration is not what it should be, when developers like me work as accidental server, network and database administrators.

Azure promises to fix a lot of this. It is not perfect, and my skills are not yet fit to this new environment. Azure costs can run high compared to a cheap server. I'm more afraid of mistakes, downtime and data loss, but have less control to fix things. There is no simple SQL Azure backup system. I'm not convinced that I could recover a broken webapp fast. At least there is Remote Desktop now.

But once I got my simple app out of a shared physical server to its own corner of the Azure cloud, I knew there is no way back.

-mika-