I’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing cloud computing with our customers lately and the common theme among them all has been “lean”. Windows Azure can provide some tremendous benefits to nearly every organization we speak with: operating cost reduction, faster time to market, scale on demand. It literally can’t get any leaner that this.
The challenge I’m running into is that it’s hard for architects and developers to get a big picture of the Azure platform and how all the features can be used together to build solutions. Microsoft is shipping new services on a quarterly basis and each new service is designed to solve a particular need our customers are asking for. We need a way to see these services holistically as a set of building blocks or ingredients to use in our solutions.