Is it easy to transition from Azure trial to full production mode for your clients?

Question

I plan on using Azure to deliver my service to my clients. Is the following possible/best way to do this?

• start using Azure through my Bizspark membership by using the trial version
• develop and test my application on the Azure server using the tools they provide (Visual Studio, SQL Azure etc.)
• Once my service is ready to deliver in the real world, switch from trial to full version

Will the only costs associated with delivering my service be usage-based? Will I need to ever purchase a full Azure licence or will all I ever need already be provided by Bizspark? Is there any advantage to downloading Visual Studio on my on machine or should I just develop it all on Azure?

Sorry for the ton of questions....I GREATLY appreciate any help getting started on this platform.

Thanks,

Answer 1

There is no trial version of Windows Azure itself and there is no "Azure license" - it's all 'production'. BizSpark provides monthly benefits, essentially a subsidy of services, but there's no functionality difference. If you use BizSpark you're deploying to the same data centers that a full-paying customer is. That said there are staging and production slots in Azure to allow you to test in the cloud before exposing your application "live" via a public URL, but that's a little different than the context you were implying.

What you do want to consider however is who owns the subscription and who are the service administrator and co-administrators. If you own the subscription and accounts under BizSpark, you can't just transition ownership of the subscription to your client. They would have to create a new subscription and you'd have to recreate storage accounts, services, etc. under their subscription along with move all of the assets you might have started under your account. That's not impossible, but something to plan for.

There are others on this list that can offer more 'real world' advice of such transitions, but I would suggest using your BizSpark account for your own development. When clients are involved, encourage them to get their own subscription - 90-day trial accounts are fine and can be transitioned to FULL paid accounts easily. They will own the subscription, but can make you the service administration or co-admin. Then when the project is complete, they simply drop you as administrator and you're done!

As for needing an account beyond BizSpark - you might not depending on size of project. You can set up the account so that if you do need more than the monthly allotment, overages will be bill at pay-as-you-go rates. Do be aware that BizSpark is a 3-year program.

As for "develop it all in Azure" vs. "download Visual Studio"... Azure is a deployment platform, you have to develop your code in something. For .NET, absolutely Visual Studio, but for other environments Java, PHP, node.js, etc. you can use whatever you want. There are SDKs available for a variety of platforms.

Answer 2

Your BizSpark account, with a 3-year window, should give you plenty to get started. Initially it's set with a $0 spending cap, so that if you exceed your monthly resource allotment (e.g. 1500 compute-hours, 35GB outbound bandwidth, etc.) your account would be disabled until the next month. Or... you can disable the spending cap, and any overage is charged to your credit card. So there shouldn't be concern moving forward with your BizSpark account.

Note that BizSpark, tied to an MSDN subscription, is not a trial subscription - it functions just like any other Windows Azure subscription, just with certain resources granted to you without having to pay for them. At the end of the 3-year period, you'll need to check Terms of Service to see if you need to migrate your app+data to a new subscription (I suspect you might need to). Customer Service can help with this.

Regarding downloading Visual Studio vs. "developing it all on Azure" - not sure what you mean by that. With either Virtual Machines or web/worker roles for your code, you still need to develop the apps that get deployed to virtual machines (whether those vm's are managed by Windows Azure or you). You'd need Visual Studio (or Eclipse, or whatever environment you develop in) installed locally to build your code.