Ask HN: Is anyone else on Hacker News using Windows Azure?
I am using SQL Azure, blob storage, 2 web roles and 1 worker role. I have Accelerator for websites set up to allow ease of deployment for multiple websites on the same shared instances :)
It's very nice that you can define your app and then assign resources to it after the fact. As long as designed properly from the start to support this model things seem to work really well.
My main gripes about it are the limitations of SQL Azure -- no cross db joins, mysterious performance throttling. Federations seems like a KILLER feature, but for it's own limitations (no cross-db again, and no support for something like distributed/partitioned views, because the partitioning basically has to be determined at the application level). I want this scale out feature to take place at the database level if possible, the way partitioned views do in SQL Server Enterprise Edition. DO I really want to manually handle fan-out queries to make sure that no two users get the same user name? No.
I'm hoping they will improve the SQL Azure story in 2013 because it could mean the difference for myself and people I know of moving only some apps to Azure vs. moving everything.