Last week I attended this session from the Belgium SQL Server User Group (www.sqlug.be) regarding this subject and I left the session with some mixed feelings. For those of you who don't know what SQL Data Services are all about, I will give you a brief introduction on the matter.

Basicaly, the Azure Services Platform is a platform "in the cloud" (read: available over the internet) that you can use for a range of services, one of them being SQL Data Services. It is Microsoft's answer to other cloud systems like Google's App Engine and EC2 from Amazon.

To comment it a little, let's take a look at what is happening today ...

Today, you buy a server in your local computer store. You buy a DVD with software containing an operating system and you also buy a DVD that contains software like SQL Server. You install the software on your machine and you're ready to go. If the data you are storing in your SQL database is critical to your business, you probably need to hire a DBA or system administrator to maintain your system. He needs to backup your data once in a while and if you have a lot of data, you'll probably need to buy extra disk space for storing the backups. Your administrator also needs to create a fallback scenario in case your system is experiencing difficulties. Maybe you need to buy a second server to create a cluster. And when you're business is really expanding, you're maybe required to buy even more servers and more software to handle performance issues to support the increasing demand on your system.

Now, this is were cloud services can come to the rescue. As we speak, Microsoft is building enormous datacenters that contain a couple of thousand server computers for you. Instead of buying expensive hard- and software and maintaining these systems yourself, Microsoft will host and maintain everything for you. They will be responsible for taking backups, performing upgrades and implementing fallback scenario's. They will offer a total hard- and software solution "as a service" and everything will be made available to you through the internet. You will only receive an invoice from Microsoft based on the number of servers you require, the amount of data you consume or the bandwith you claim.

It all sounds like a very nice scenario, but I'm a pretty sceptical person ...

• Which company is willing to put all it's business critical data in a datacenter from Microsoft? Will your data be safe in these datacenters? Will it be secure from hackers or misuse?
• As we all know: information is power. Microsoft can get a lot of insight into you company when it can data-mine all your business critical information? Who will prevent them from doing so?
• What if one day Microsoft is facing bankrupcy and their datacenters need to close? Which company is willing to be totally dependant on the services and availability of one vendor?
• What is the SLA Microsoft will provide for these services? What will be the pricing policy and how can you verify all the parameters that are taken into account when Microsoft creates your invoice?
• Microsoft will have a lot of control over your system. What is the level of control you as a user will have? Will you be able to profile your database and and be able to see what is causing issues?

I guess all these questions will be answered within the near future. The Azure Services Platform will be commercialy available October/November 2009. The future will tell if this story becomes a success. To be continued ...

By David Stroobants, .Net Solutions Architect