Is Azure really handy for a mid-range website in regards to Azure SQL performance when speed is critical?

Question

So, I read a lot about Azure yesterday when I review my future Webapps plans. The question is whether or not to migrate in 2012 from a dedicated hosting with two network strong servers (one front for IIS, one for SQL Server 2008). We are only talking about ASP.net websites, say 10 websites requesting the same database.

Pros: I want to let go of hardware / OS / crash maintenance problems. At this point, Azure looks cool.

Cons: I read this / that opinion about speed. Especially regarding SQL Azure.

Speed ​​is one of the key points of my sites. You click, it just displays, as in local mode.

Any success with migration (production site, no test) and lack of performance loss?

What is the point of migrating to the cloud if we lose performance due to the latency of the SQL Azure instance, as some people report? Shouldn't Azure SQL provide the best scalability scalability for SQL growth?

In particular, I read that SQL Azure is always shared, which means that you cannot reserve an instance of X proc for your service, is this a strong limitation for the production environment? It seems to have some point.

Any testimonials evaluated on this matter, thanks.

Answer 1

Windows Azure is built as a production platform for distributed systems. As for SQL Azure, I'm not sure what you mean by “slow” - I would suggest raising a benchmark to make sure that it meets your needs.

True, SQL Azure is a shared service. But this is something you don’t need to worry about - the Azure SQL team scales hardware to meet demand through its user base.

When you create your web application (in the role of Azure Web):

• Use the new AppFabric cache for session state (this is a cache-and-service independent of any virtual machine instances)
• Cache of frequently retrieved database data (either in AppFabric Cache or through a new role-based CDN)
• Consider scaling (up to 2, 4, or 8 cores) as the base machine, since each core has an associated network bandwidth of 100 Mbps. If your queries return large amounts of data, high network bandwidth is a key performance metric. If these queries return only small data items, this should not be a problem.

You can get a 30-day trial version of www.windowsazurepass.com (use promo code DPWE01). This will include a pair of 1 GB SQL Azure databases, as well as three small (single-core) computing instances that should be good for some initial benchmarking.