Here are a few things Windows Azure must do to catch up with Amazon Web Services

I have spent many days of my - admittedly not so short anymore - life working with Amazon's cloud and although it is not perfect I definitely like it.

Amazon sort of invented the Infrastructure as a Service cloud and it is a huge success. Apparently a staggering 1% of the internet runs on AWS and one out of three users visit an AWS hosted service on a daily basis. Wow!

One of the reasons of this is success that a few other powerhouses (i.e. Google and Microsoft) decided to bet on a slightly different horse: the Platform as a Service. PaaS is on a higher abstraction level and in theory promises more benefits but the fact that the application must be modified (most of the time) in order to be hosted on a PaaS turned out to be a big threshold. Hence the IaaS proved to be the more popular option so far and the others were looking with envy at the success of (most notably) Amazon.

As could be expected this situation will not last forever and Microsoft with its Windows Azure offering has moved into the IaaS territory as well. Which is good, after all competition is good!

Note: do not consider Amazon's offering as an IaaS offering only, as it has many features nowadays which compete head-to-head with Microsoft PaaS features.

I started working with Azure a few months ago and the first thing that drew my attention is the minimalism approach of Azure in comparison with verbose (and sometimes crowded) screens of Amazon Web Services.

Compare (one step) of a Launch Instance wizard of Amazon:

With the entire Windows Azure dialog:

Quite refreshing, but in fairness it also indicates that Azure is still lacking in features in comparison with Amazon. Do we need all those features? Most definitely not, but sometimes a few them come in very handy.

But in my view the most important thing that Windows Azure should work on is not in the feature area (although still appreciated) but much more in the management sphere.

Below are a few things I really missed when working with Azure.

1. Detailed Identity & Access Management. With AWS you can create users for both UI and / or API and can provide very detailed permissions for them. If needed this user directory can be synchronised with on-premise directories and this proves to be a very flexible and important directory. Azure then is very limited in this area, and although the have a very promising asset in the form of Windows Azure Active Directory this is is very much in its infancy and lacks integration throughout the various Azure services.
2. Monitoring & Alerting: Amazon's Cloudwatch can not be considered as a full blown monitoring service but for quite a few services this proves to be more than sufficient. By providing a wide variety of standard metrics and allowing custom metrics it provides a lot of input on which alarms can be defined. In contrast, Azure's proposition is much more limited which becomes problematic in real-life deployments.
3. Infrastructure as Code: Since IaaS turns what used to be hardware into software, the Infrastructure as Code phenomenon has taken off. Rather than fiddling with physical stuff, you can write code to do that for you. Both AWS as well as Azure provide an API that allow you to do that (in a procedural manner) but AWS provides on top of this a much more powerful service in the form of Cloudformation. Cloudformation allows you to specify and manage your cloud resources in a declarative which provides a lot many benefits.
4. Managed DNS: When launching new services these must be available by name rather than IP address. Amazon's Route 53 provides a manages and programmable (also through Cloudformation) DNS provides that ensures that you can launch an fully operational, accessible service, without having to go back to you DNS provider of choice to ensure things are modified accordingly.

This list is certainly not exhaustive but I am positive that Microsoft (and othes like Google) can mount a serious challenge to Amazon. However we need more than just features, especially the management area is important when it comes to run and exploit cloud based applications.