Microsoft Azure is Getting Very Close
This morning I was reading about some recent additions to Microsoft Azure and so I decided to give it a look-see about what it would be like deploying some things I've been noodling on to Azure. What I found was really pretty nice. Almost.
Azure is getting built out as a series of services that you can add on - not unlike Google's App Engine, and Heroku - but in the case of the first two, they are all owned and operated by the parent companies, where as Heroku allows other companies to offer services to customers. What's different with Azure and Google is that they are about hosting more than a web service or app - Azure now has Batch Processing, Hadoop, Hive, Storm, and a host of other services that can all be brought to bear at the problem you are trying to solve.
This is very nice because Azure also has all the nice monitoring tools like NewRelic, as they own it all, so it's easy to see what's happening, and what you might need to do next. Very slick. They even have Machine Learning as an add-on with code you can write in R and Python. Not my favorite languages, but I get that these are the most popular for the platform, so I'm willing to go with it for now.
In all, I was very impressed with Azure - until I got to the technical details. Then I kinda felt a little cheated. Azure is (understandably) written to use Windows Servers as the back-end first. I can believe they might have linux in the plans, but it's kinda tough to work with Windows Servers underneath if you're writing batch jobs. After all, you need to know what you're writing on - and in the case of clojure, that's the JVM, and while the JVM runs on Windows Server, it's not anything I can reproduce easily.
That's not to say Azure is out of the running. Google App Engine can do many of the same things, but doesn't have the breath and depth of the monitoring - or the additional services like Hadoop and Storm. Sure, you can get machines from Google and put Hadoop and Storm on them, but that's forcing you to be in the role of administrator, and Azure is trying to take you out of that role - on purpose.
Google is giving you a little more choice on the lower levels of the stack, but isn't supporting you as well from a platform point of view. If I were going to make a relatively complex system, and didn't want to mess with the administration - because the performance wasn't that big a deal, and the cost of managed services wasn't too much, then I might really pick Azure.
But that's a lot of "ifs". Most of the times I'm going to know exactly what I need, and for those cases, Heroku is far more likely to be the choice.