Startup on Windows Azure

Microsoft were one of the sponsors at Confoo in Montreal this year. They were promoting the Azure cloud platform, and I managed to get snared into creating a 90 day trial account. Okay, okay, the RC Mini Cooper helped.

Image borrowed from http://www.mandogroup.com/microsoft-build-2012/

I went through the sign-up process via my Nexus 7 tablet and it all worked fine, other than the annoying pop-up dialogs. Those are a UX mistake on smaller tablets and on smartphones. Didn't stop me, and I doubt that this was a typical use case, but still...

After signing up I fired up my laptop, created a basic 'Hello Confoo' HTML page, init'ed a Git archive, set the remote to my Azure Website, committed and pushed. And voila, my page was active and an RC Mini Cooper was in my grubby paws.

This was really a simple process, and given that I have a new client project, as one does, I thought I would give it a shot on Azure.

The project is very client specific, so I won't discuss it much, but there are many components to it that will allow me to see how it all works on Azure. The components are the usual: -

• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server
• Flask micro-framework
• SQL database
• nginx web server
• CDN

I normally use MySQL or Postgres for the SQL database but I am toying with using SQL Server as it's part of the free trial.

Plus I want to be able to easily setup and maintain this system so I will also: -

• Use Chef or Ansible for CM
• Setup a package system for code deploys

This should provide enough to have a decent idea of what Azure can do as compared to AWS. I will document the process and highlight and oddities on this blog. Must say that I don't expect any issues and hopefully I won't need the full 90 days to get it all working...