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Breaking up is hard to do

Posted on 3 Mar 2009 at 17:05

Mark Newton discusses how best to part ways with your current ISP and move to a new one, and finds out more about the Azure cloud.

After this marathon program installation, which left me feeling that it could have been made simpler, a quick fire-up of Visual Studio 2008 showed an extra option when creating a project called Cloud Service. From there, you can create four types of Cloud service: a simple blank one; a web one; a worker one; and a web-and-worker one. I'll come back to what these basic types mean later, but for now let's try Cloud Web Service, which creates a project with all the necessary files. You're then supposed to create your killer app, but in this case I just added a textbox and a button to the default.aspx page to test things. You can now run and debug your web application locally just as you would with any Visual Studio project. The first time you do this the system has to make some changes to the configuration of your machine and set up the SQL database, so it takes a little time. My application ran okay (but let's face it, if something that simple didn't work it would be cause for deep concern) in the debugging environment that Microsoft calls "The Cloud on your desktop", because it fully emulates the Cloud environment - if your app works here, it should work for real out in the Cloud. It provides you with breakpoints and single-stepping with variable watches, all the things you'd expect in a modern development environment. This is one of the more compelling reasons for developing in Azure, as debugging in some of its competitor's environments can be very tricky indeed.

The next stage is to publish your project to the Cloud, and to do this you must have previously registered with Azure and requested tokens for whatever services you wish to use, in this case Azure Hosting. The allocation of these tokens depends on the capacity of the current Azure system, so you may have to wait for your tokens to come through. The Publish menu option creates just those files needed to run your application on the live web servers in the Cloud, then opens a browser that takes you to your Azure area with the option to create a new project. Just fill in the textboxes for such things as "project name" and "URL of project", and then the project area will be created and the files uploaded. Once the system has created this area, a password will be generated for it - don't lose this! When the upload finishes, you can test your Azure application by pointing a browser to the URL you specified.

Apart from the setting up of the development environment, it really is quite easy and trouble-free. Apparently, you can use the Azure Cloud to host any ASP.NET application, and for the present the service is free, although the billing modules are shown as "to follow". Now you can forget about running your own servers and worrying about bandwidth requirements, and your web application will scale to capabilities you could only have dreamt of in the past. Your servers and data will be backed up, and you can sleep easy knowing that your web application will be available 100% of the time. All this is promised.

So will I be porting all my web apps to Azure, and will I be recommending that my clients host their future apps in the Cloud? Sorry Microsoft, but for now I will not. This isn't just because it's an early release of the development environment, but because Azure comes from a company that in the past has shown a distinct preference for "coolness" and functionality over security. Time and time again, there have been security flaws that need to be patched. Should Azure become vulnerable, or should it need to be patched in such a way that it breaks your application, what recourse would you have against a company the size of Microsoft (or for that matter, any of the Cloud providers such as Google and Amazon)? How secure will your company data be when hosted out on the Cloud? Cloud computing offers great possibilities for the future, but a panacea for all the internet's hosting problems it ain't, yet.