I went to the training event for Windows Azure Platform as a part of Bizspark camp. That is a great event. Thank you, Microsoft. They organized this event for the start-up like us.
The sessions are very useful and informative too! The speaker, Steve Nagy, did a great job. We got a lot of information about Azure today!
I am interested to use Azure SQL and Compute. They are Platform as a Service. Basically, I just need to deploy the website via Visual Studio to Azure Compute and run SQL in Azure SQL. They will handle all load balancing and OS Patching. That is good for the start up companies like us. We have not a dedicated server team to do those things I can scale in or out the Azure Compute instances when the load of website changes.
The most interesting thing is Azure SQL. For Azure Compute, they charge the number of instances you used and the size of each instance. But they only charge the storage of database in Azure SQL. They will do replication and load balancing behind the scene. They won't charge CPU Usage. I don't need to scale up the server when the load is increasing. Azure SQL should give more CPU and memory resources to the SQL server I use. They can handle the load without charge. That is good for web application will query the database a lot and run some expensive queries.