Summary
At the time of writing, it was four years since Ray Ozzie first outlined the "services transformation" occurring within our industry how it would impact users, developers, and IT. Ray outlined how software-plus-services would enable customers to protect existing on-premise investments while transitioning to more cloud-oriented architectures where it made sense.
Since then, Microsoft has had great success with Xbox LIVE and launched a suite of online business productivity messaging and collaboration solutions. It has also released a public version of Office Web Apps. Now with the Windows Azure Platform, it enables customers to take existing applications on the Microsoft stack on-premise and deploy portions of them onto the cloud.
When deciding on the suitability of Windows Azure platform for your problem domain, we encourage you to make use of the book's decision framework and benefits explained in this chapter. Here is a brief summary of some of the factors you should consider:
Potential...
