Is Azure really conveniant for a medium production website regarding SQL Azure performance, when speed is a critical matter?

So i did read a lot about Azure yesterday as i'm considering my plans for the future of my Webapps. The question is whether to migr开发者_高级运维ate or not in 2012 from a dedicated hosting with two networked strong servers (one front for IIS, one for SQL Server 2008). We're talking about ASP.net webapps only, say 10 websites network querying the same database.

The pros : i do want to let go the hardware / OS maintenance / crash worries. Azure looks cool on that point.

The cons : i read so/so opinions about speed. Especially regarding SQL Azure.

Speed is one of the key point of my websites. You click, it just shows as in local mode.

Anyone as success with a migration (production website, no test) and no performance loss ?

What the point of migrating to the cloud if we loose performance because of the SQL Azure instance latency as some people reports ? Isn't SQL Azure supposed to provide better perf with scaling habilities for SQL growth ?

Especially i read SQL Azure is always shared, that means you can't reserve a X proc instance for your service, isn't it a strong limitation for production environnement ? It seems hasardous to some point.

Any testimony appreciated regarding this subject, thank you.

---

Windows Azure is built to be a production platform for distributed systems. As far as SQL Azure goes, I'm not sure what you mean by "slower" - I'd suggest pushing up a benchmark to see if it meets your needs.

It's true that SQL Azure is a shared service. But that's something you don't need to worry about - the SQL Azure team scales the hardware to meet demand across its user base.

When you build out your web app (on an Azure Web Role):

• Use the new AppFabric Cache for session state (this is cache-as-a-service, independent from any virtual machine instances)
• Cache frequently-retrieved database data (either in AppFabric Cache, or via the new role-based CDN)
• Consider scale-up (to 2, 4, or 8 cores) as a baseline machine, as each core has an associated ~100Mbps of network bandwidth. If your queries return large volumes of data, more network bandwidth is a key performance option. If these queries only return small data items, this shouldn't be an issue.

You can grab a 30-day trial at www.windowsazurepass.com (use promo code DPWE01). This will include a pair of 1GB SQL Azure database, as well as three Small (single-core) compute instances, which should be good for some initial benchmarking.