Cloud computing with Azure and Wcf

Question

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.

Answer 1

Regarding performance, it is not going to deffer anything from your local environment. You can do a sample test by deploying your wcf service and enabling performance counters.

Manageability, if you are choosing webrole or worker to deploy your WCF, you will get different ways to deploy.

1) From Visual studio

2) From azure management portal

3) You can automate through powershell or Management API

4) Diagnostics are availabe and you can configure SCOM alerts too.

Coming to scalability, its the core stength of cloud platform. You can either expand manually or you can use windows azure auto scale application block to auto scale based on several system and application counters. Scaling up in azure is just a configuration change.

Please let me know for any more specific questions

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Answer 2

1.  Performance -

Raw computing power - you will want to evaluate the types of VM's you're getting from Azure to make sure their specifications can match to the specifications that you need

External resources - performance of external to your cluster (Azure Role) resources will be key to your WCF's performance.  If you're going to use SQL Azure, you will want to take SQL Azure performance targets into account.  If you're using dedicated IaaS VM that drives the database, or Azure BLOB storage, or on-premise database server, etc.  

2. Manageability/Deployment - There are a number of ways to manage and deploy your bits: scripts(cmdlets), clicking buttons in the portal page, Visual Studio, third party tools, or custom code.

3. Scalability - as Veerendra mentioned, you can custom-code your own auto-scaling logic with the help of an application block from Microsoft's patterns and practices group, or take a completely hands-off approach and utilize a third party monitoring and auto-scaling service like AzureWatch

4. Monitoring/Diagnostics - Also very important.  There are number of vendors now that support Azure for active monitoring purposes including Microsoft itself with their SCOM product.  Prices range from $166/mo per server from vendors like AppDynamics to $9.90/mo per server for vendors like AzureWatch.  There are also tools like Cerebrata's Diagnostics Manager that do a great job at on-demand monitoring without a monthly fee.

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Auto-scaling & monitoring service for Windows Azure applications at http://www.paraleap.com

Answer 3

Ok guys thanks alot for the posting it really helps. Especially i got the answer for scalability and performance. 

This is my actual situation, can wcf and azure help me or i should be looking some where else? Please advise.

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).