Two Complaints About Moving My Blog to Azure

I’ve moved this blog to Azure.

Everything went really smooth. I must say that I’m impressed with the work that Microsoft has done. Well. Almost everything. I got two complaints.

Well. Almost everything went great. The verification process for domain names are cumbersome. You can’t expect to use CNAMEs without down time, since Azure won’t save the settings unless it can verify that the domain points at Azure. That also means that when the move is made Azure has no idea what to do with the domain name since the setting has not been saved.

For A records you have to create a special DNS entry to verify. That’s much better but still slow (since the DNS record has to propagate).

Better solution

Azure should be able to generate a file which you can download and put in the root of your website. Azure can then try to download it and verify it’s contents (for instance a GUID). In that way you have shown that you own the domain (or rather have access to it). And that process is made directly so that everything is set when your DNS changes go through.

I haven’t figured out a way to see what my current configuration will cost when the trial period ends (i.e. the total for all sites, virtual machines, Db etc). If you know how, please tell me.

This is a bit scary. I don’t want to get a big fat bill when the trials expire. It also makes it hard to scale the servers to fit your wallet and your services.

Summary

The GUI is just plain wonderful. It’s easy to understand where to go to configure things. The wordpress installation was so easy that my mom could have done it Hopefully they’ll fix the two above things too.

I’ll try to put up a build server in it and play a bit with the service bus. Will get back on that.