“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height” - Sonnet 43, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

So “what’s love got to do with it?” (Private Dancer, Tina Turner) Hint: if people live for love, then businesses live for money

On July 14th, Microsoft announced Azure pricing and a “grace period” through PDC 2009. A primary rationale here is to enable development organizations to optimize deployment and monetization models to maximize Azure commercial opportunities.

So, whether you are a romantic (like Ms Browning above) or perhaps more hardened like Tina Turner’s Private Dancer (or Stanley Kubrick a la Full Metal Jacket), one thing is for sure - Microsoft wants Azure to “love you long time.” How deep, wide, high or long is the question.

Check out a this article in SD Times - PreEmptive’s Dotfuscator instruments Azure applications By David Worthington – where Dave Worthington makes many of the very same points.

Of course, we announced Runtime Intelligence Service (RIS) Azure support to help developers answer these very questions. While perhaps not as soaring as a sonnet – Runtime Intelligence allows for any .NET component deployed into Azure to be injected (post-build) with session, feature and method level monitoring. The runtime intelligence is streamed out of Azure for analysis. Other than writing a custom solution, this is perhaps the only means to measure adoption, usage patterns and performance inside Azure in near real-time.

Now, my posts are all intended to help you (blog followers) find more ways to make more money (we want to spread the love). So, you will note that I very specifically said the RIS helps to answer these questions. What the Azure development community really needs is an ROI calculator that will combine real usage data (from both legacy and piloted Azure applications) with Microsoft pricing and the offset IT expenses to come up with an Azure ROI calculator. I know there are lots of calculators being written – but how many of them can incorporate actual usage data before and after deployment to the cloud? That’s not our business – but could it be yours?

If yes, let me know and I will make sure you have what you need to call our RI Service via our RESTful API – making your calculator uniquely able to reliably predict cloud ROI.

As always, i have a more philosophical take on this issue on my personal blog at http://apps-are-people-too.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-do-i-love-thee-let-me-count-ways.html