At what point does a project require Azure?

Question

I was diving further into the .NET framework over at Microsoft's site, and I came across Azure, a technology that I have really only briefly heard about prior to my investigation.

Now, that got me thinking, why exactly did Microsoft make Azure, and why is it useful over other technologies?

For example, for an ASP.NET web app (WF / MVC), when does it make sense to seek the help of Azure?

Answer 1

A good analogy to the rescue.

A car engine is designed for peak capacity, not normal capacity. So for the 1% of the time when you really need to gun it an get passed that semi-truck, you can do it. Unfortunately this also means lower fuel efficiency overall, than if you didn't have to design for peak capacity.

Most people design their data centers the same way... for peak capacity. If you have 1 million hits on the first of the month, but the rest of the month you are idle, then you still have to have enough capacity to handle 1 million hits all the time. This means you have to maintain that much capacity, and pay for it.

That is a lot of extra work for 12 days out of the year when you really need the horsepower. However, if you used Azure, then you could scale automatically in response to demand. This would save you an enormous amount of time and money in upkeep and hardware.