I wrote Clouds in our Future to see if I could spark a good conversation about the mental shift required to consider SQL Azure as one of the options we should consider when decide to host data. I can’t say I succeeded well at that goal! I get that the tools aren’t ready and that’s a metered service, and I get that it’s not a miracle solution, but I sense the same kind of reluctance to consider cloud based hosting as we did virtualization a few years ago. Of course, virtualization has gotten better and we’ve got a lot more experience, and we need that same growth with Azure.

Here’s the thing to think about – at what point does it tip for you? Is it tools? Features? Body of knowledge? At what point does it shift from bleeding edge to not? Are you serving your business or employer well today by ignoring the option as not baked enough?

My note to Microsoft: Azure isn’t going to explode until you get us tools and feature parity, at least the features that make sense in the cloud.