re: Windows Azure is changing the start-up paradigm

James Varga — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 13:56:04 GMT

Thanks Jacqui,

I'm not sure in a fairly modern approach whether onboarding and/or offboarding needs to be much of an issue. If an application is built with a distinct Data Abstraction Layer then portability should be fairly easy. In our case we made sure we had this in place from the beginning so that we had the portability we needed.

We have tried to maintain the same services based (SOA) approach that we have taken with the whole project (a service based on services, hosted on services, powered by services) even internally. This provides a huge amount of flexibility even within the architecture itself.

As with any environment however the more you optimise for it the more restricted you become. This doesn't make it impossible but does mean you may need to re-engineer for other specific capabilities.

Most of the time - with this sort of approach - I don't think you really need to worry about it these days.

re: Windows Azure is changing the start-up paradigm

Jacqui Taylor — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:50:11 GMT

Great post James.

I'm assuming that although you are obviously happy with your service you have built on Azure I'm assuming that the off boarding process will be also be simple, so that as cloud offerings mature you are not dependant on an Azure platform and can switch services?

It would be interesting to know what interoperability considerations you also made to ensure that you can build additional services on this or other cloud platforms as you expand the Miicard offering.