Microsoft Azure turning 5 years old! + Azure Cloud Platform roadmap

On 2/1/2015, Azure turned 5 years old!  While Azure began with PaaS capabilities at the Professional Developers Conference 2008, it was in 'free preview' until the commercial launch in 2010.  We clearly have come a long way from back then. I can see such a huge shift in the way Microsoft is thinking about Cloud today as compared to back then. We literally are betting the future of the company on this, and I for one could not be more excited about our future. We are just at the cusp of the Cloud being adopted by the mainstream of consumers and I am super excited about the new scenarios and potential that these technologies will unlock!

Ever since the G-Series announcement, I have had quite a few customers really getting interested in the Cloud. They had some scenarios where they needed to scale up once a month to crunch a big set of data. They had been struggling for the last few years because they couldnt justify purchasing those same servers for their narrow need. The G-Series VMs will now allow them to move that workload to the Cloud for the limited amount of time they need, and then they can de-provision those VMs once they are done. As they are considering that move, now they are interested in other Azure services as well to see how they can move to a hybrid cloud model. I pointed them to the Microsoft Azure public website , as well as the Cloud Platform roadmap  so that they can see what else is coming down the pipe.