Cloud computing with Azure and Wcf

[everhett.raman]

Hi guys, Came across few materials about win azure and wcf services for cloud computing. If anyone working on this platform and technology, can u please share your experience on:
i) Performance (comparison to clustering)
ii) Manageability (deployment)
iii) Scalability (when the server farm expands)
Thank you in advance, would really appreciate any comments pertaining these subjects.

[pritaeas]

i) Performance is fine, but am not quite sure what kind of performance you want to compare. Can you elaborate, or give an example? It would depend heavily on the kind of application you are building, and the components needed.

ii) Deployment is relatively easy once you have a package (you can make these from VS). Uploading/installing a package will take about 20 minutes minimum, but there are provisions for a staging environment.

iii) Adding processors/servers is just updating the configuration from the portal. It can even be controlled from your code.

[everhett.raman]

It is a order management system with heavy database transactions. The orders have to be in real time. Yet daemons will be feeding real time data into the database as well. I am looking forward to load in-memory database in the services too.
Hense my concern is, could wcf and azure's help me to achieve this by maximizing processing affinity for asynchronous programming (if server farm expands).
Request/response - through tcpBinding (no queues but smart asynchronous request handler implementation).

[pritaeas]

If you have a clear picture of what you want, I'd feed it to the guys on the Azure forums at MS. They're really helpful in finding flaws and recommendations.

[everhett.raman]

Sure if that helps.