So when people try to convince you to use Azure, the typical justifications are “elasticity” or “scalability”.
Great, all good points but also too obvious. I want to share what I think is the golden value of this platform: Abstraction.
I’m a developer. I want to spend my time doing what I do best: Writing code. I definitely don’t want to waste it configuring the “plumbings” of virtual machines, operating systems, hotfixes, storage, etc. I just want to say: “Hey Azure, here’s my website, make it so” and magic happens. While many cloud providers can only offer you a virtual machine hosting platform (and I honestly wonder for how long these will last after turning into commodities as that’s all they can do) this is what I think makes Azure special: It allows me to go from idea to viral site in 4 hours.
For real: It. Just. Happened.
But that doesn’t apply only to web devs. Are you a data scientist? Do you want to spend your time building a ML experiment or configuring clusters, installing a bunch of software, setting up virtual networks, etc? Are you a DBA? Do you want to spend your time designing and optimizing the logical design of your databases or making sure your storage alignment will maximize your IO, configuring backups, configuring replication, testing your backups, installing your db engines, installing hotfixes for them, etc?
So here’s why you should be already using Azure: Because life is short and your ideas are way too cool to be buried in plumbing. That’s why.
