16.16. Advantages

Here is a summary of the main advantages of Windows Azure and cloud computing:

• Low entry cost and ability to quickly scale up your applications infrastructure for peaks of demand

• No infrastructure expertise necessary—let Microsoft take care of this for you

• Potentially cheaper than a dedicated data center, although a detailed analysis would be necessary to determine this

• Greener computing

• Allows you to utilize existing .NET skills

• No hardware compatibility issues due to abstraction of hardware (although I would question how much of a problem this currently is)