An expensive bag of rusty spanners.

I've been to an Azure Training day today. The training was great, however it it seems that none of what I learnt was any use to me, or if it was then the costs make it prohibitive.

I was looking at it for scalability. What-Am-I-Doing is likely to need some help scaling. It creates a reasonable amount of data - 600 or so lines of data per day - and I need a way to multiply that by the number of users. Azure is not the answer.

SQL Azure costs either $9.99 per month for a 1GB instance, or $99.99 per month for a 10GB instance. Plus I'd have to pay for data transfer.

A 10GB instance is neither cheap, or any more scalable than a standard SQL server licence.

Rewriting the app to use the Azure storage option is a load of work, and to be honest, I can't be bothered. The reason for using a relational database is so that the data can be easily managed and related.

I think that I get, I just don't get it. There was one person who I could see was going to get great benefit from Azure. They run a public organization that each year runs a public survey. In one weekend they get a massive amount of traffc to collect survey results. This is an ideal use of Azure instances - they could just switch on more instances for the weekend, and then switch them all off when the survey is complete.

It was an interesting day, well enough presented, and the hosts (ICS at Basingstoke) were great. It's just a shame that Azure is not there yet.