Top 10 asks for Azure
Azure is picking up tremendous amount of momentum and as a company in the vanguard of this transformation, we have been privy to many a discussion with ISVs and Enterprise businesses on building applications on Azure. Azure is by far the most complete application development platform on the cloud. It is both feature rich and stable for a version 1 platform. Here are the Top 10 themes that we are hearing in terms of areas in which Azure can evolve to keep the momentum going.
- Compliance: Businesses that are serious about moving to the cloud in many industries will need the data centers to be certified for standards such as HIPAA & PCI. It is also not clear if the Azure data centers are SAS 70 II compliant which is a starting point for most compliance needs. There is some information here but it is not conclusive at the moment for Azure.
- Geo Affinity: Currently, there is limited ability currently to instruct Azure where to run the applications, store data etc. This is a critical need to tackle regulations in most countries like the “Patriot Act” which mandate certain sensitive data to be located with the United States only.
- Role Based access: Azure currently doesn’t have the notion of Role based access to its portals, deployed applications, billing etc. As larger businesses adopt Azure, they need to compartmentalize access to specific areas of functionality to people in specific roles. For example, the developer and an IT Pro need to set up solution environments for testing / production etc while a “Business User” might need to review billing and download usage reports once a week.
- Multi tenancy : As with most platforms, Azure does not provide multi tenancy out of the box. It provides all the tools essential to creating multi tenant applications. An excellent example of a multi tenant application is “Riviera”, a solution that Microsoft and Cumulux built to showcase these capabilities in Azure. Check out http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/riviera
- Dynamic Scalability: Azure provides APIs to manage you application’s foot print on the cloud and even allows you to pick the size of the Virtual Machine that will run your application’s fabric ( at deployment time ) but it doesn’t do it automatically for you. One of the biggest promises of the cloud is its innate ability to be elastic. In other words, the cloud’s ability to stretch and contract based on the load on your application. This functionality is not available out of the box and has to be done manually or by using 3rd party software.
- Enterprise Service Level Agreement (SLA) : Azure does provide SLAs for applications that are running on its platform. In fact it has a different SLA for its various components like Compute, Storage and App Fabric which is all great but it leaves a lot of gaps. For example, you need to have at least 2 instances running for the SLA to be in effect. The compute SLA is for 99.95% uptime which equates to about 4.38 hours of downtime per year- pretty good for a cloud operating system in its version 1.
- Billing Visibility: This is an area which will receive plenty of coverage once businesses start adopting Azure for real world mission critical applications. Businesses need to know how much they are consuming and have the ability to set thresholds based on usage.
- Licensing: Currently, Azure is available for commercial use only through credit card based purchases. Thought it is certain to evolve into other purchasing models including standard purchase orders , many companies are going to be hamstrung from trying out Azure until there are developer versions ( maybe with constrained functionalities ) available. Including Azure to standard Enterprise Agreements will ensure a faster adoption rate in larger enterprises as it eliminates long purchasing cycles that are prevalent in this space.
- Auditability – Azure currently does not provide any audit trail for its data, applications and other artifacts in the system for archival and compliance purposes. This is critical in many verticals such as healthcare & financial services.
- Portability - Having the ability to move data and applications is critical for companies to pursue “Sometimes Cloud” or “Parallel Cloud” strategies . In the “Sometimes Cloud” paradigm, applications use Azure as a spill over to their existing application to handle peaks in loads. In the “Parallel Cloud” strategy, ISVs might offer both an on premise as well as a cloud based version of the software depending on the nature of their end customers.
