Windows Azure for web developers vs Amazon EC2

According to the vision (and I can only talk about the vision here since the product isn't really out yet), here's a couple of reasons you might consider Azure over EC2.

Azure includes built-in load balancing abilities. If you want to do that in Amazon, you have to roll your own solution or buy a third-party solution like www.RightScale.com.

Azure-friendly-coded apps can be delivered internally or in Microsoft's cloud. If you write apps that have confidential information like financial data or health care data, not all of your clients will be willing to put their data in the public cloud. In that case, they can deploy your apps internally on Windows. That's sold as a skillset win, because you can go from public to private projects. Don't get me wrong - if you master Amazon EC2 development, then you can deploy your apps internally with Linux virtual servers in your datacenter, but it's not as turnkey. (Hard to describe a tech preview as turnkey when it's not licensed yet, hahaha.)

Having said that, it wasn't clear that the load balancing functionality is included in the box with internal deployments. If you have to do a combination of Azure plus ISA Server, that'll be a tougher deployment and management sell.

AppHarbor is a .NET cloud hosting environment that sits on Amazon EC2. The nice thing is they offer a free plan (much like Heroku does) so you can check it out yourself with very little friction.

My company is using Amazon EC2 now and I am down at the PDC watching the details on Azure unfold. I have not seen anything yet that would convince us to move away from Amazon. Azure definitely looks compelling, but the fact is I can now utilize Windows and SQL server on Amazon with SLAs in place. Ray Ozzie made it clear that Azure will be changing A LOT based on feedback from the developer community. However, Azure has a lot of potential and we'll be watching it closely.

Also, Amazon will be adding load balancing, autoscaling and dashboard features in upcoming updates to the service (see this link: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/new-features-for-amazon-ec2/). Never underestimate Amazon as they have a good headstart on Cloud Computing and a big user base helping refine their offerings already. Never underestimate Microsoft either as they have a massive developer community and global reach.

Overall I do not think the cloud services of one company are mutually exclusive from one another. The great thing is that we can leverage all of them if we want to.

Microsoft should offer up the ability to host Linux based servers in their cloud. That would really turn the world upside down!