A number of factors have come together to form a guide for Microsoft to the path that has made Azure the key to the company’s future success. That road has been bumpy, but almost always on a good trajectory. Now, as the offerings gel and mature, Microsoft has to maintain its commitments and satisfy those who have bought in while keeping the world excited about Azure.
Cloud is a great name for this market, because just like trying to control the weather, it’s hard for humans to control anything even in the best of conditions. To prove this point, there have been outages and missteps to remind Microsoft, and everyone else, that this stuff is hard, especially at these scales. Thanks to these difficulties, Azure continues to evolve, with new capabilities and features coming fast. Now that the major patterns have emerged, it is easier to help even newcomers find their bearings. Bill Wilder, CTO of Finomial, author of “Cloud Architecture Patterns” and an Azure MVP, calls this the “second generation of Azure services. These new services are rich with enterprise-class features, but also accessible to mere mortals because they hide so much of the complexity.”
