This is the first of a series of posts where I talk about what I learned building a startup using Microsoft Technologies of which I primarily focus on Windows Azure. Before I get started, I think it is important that you know that I am a Microsoft employee, and more specifically I work in the SQL Azure group as a Program Manager. The startup I built was done outside of my work at Microsoft. Throughout this series of posts I will do my best to take my Microsoft hat off and tell both the good parts and the bad parts I experienced using Azure. I’ll also talk about times that I chose to move outside of Azure and ultimately use a “hybrid” of cloud services. If you are considering Azure for your business, I hope this series will help you learn some new tricks and also avoid some of the issues I had growing my startup.
Background
First let me give you a little background on my startup, and why I did it. My startup is called Cotega . It is an online service that monitors cloud hosted SQL Server and SQL Azure databases. It allows a database administrator to register their databases and choose the things they would like Cotega to monitor for them (such as database size, availability, performance, etc.) If issues arise, Cotega can notify the dba by email or run corrective actions within the registered databases.
I created this service primarily because I love building new services. At Microsoft I have been lucky enough to start up a number of new services such as SQL Azure Data Sync, SQL Azure Data Transfer, Eye on Earth, plus a number that never saw the light of day. I wanted to see how different it would be to take my learning’s in building a new service within Microsoft and try to do it as an independent company. You might be surprised to know that the challenges in the end were not as great as you might think, but I will talk about that more in some upcoming posts.
Mostly, I started this because I was inspired by a number of great people. Over the past year I had the opportunity to meet and hear Steve Blank present. I learned about the Lean Startup Principles and the concept of a Minimum Viable Product. I read many great startup books including one from 37Signals called ReWork where I finally got inspired to take work a few hours each day outside of my day job and get this startup going. On my drive to and from work I listen to the TechZing podcasts where I hear so many inspiring tech entrepreneurs talk about their experiences in building startups. I even talked to one of the hosts, Justin Vincent, who helped give me some advice on merchant accounts. Finally there was my manager at Microsoft, Shoshanna Budzianowski, who gave me a ton of support.
In the end, I hope that I can take my learning’s back in to Azure to make it a better product for startups, because believe me, I do understand that right now, Windows Azure is the underdog with startups and is really viewed as the cloud solution for large enterprises. I believe that we at Microsoft need to do a lot of work to convince the “hacker” community that Windows Azure is a viable alternative to the free LAMP stack.
Along the way I hope I get a chance to hear from others who are building new startups and share our experience.
[...] This is the first of a series of posts where I talk about what I learned building a startup using Microsoft Technologies of which I primarily focus on Windows Azure. Before I get started, I think it is important that you know that I am a Microsoft employee, and more specifically I work in the SQL Azure group as a Program Manager. The startup I built was done outside of my work at Microsoft. Throughout this series of posts I will do my best to take my Microsoft hat off and tell both the good parts and the bad parts I experienced using Azure. I’ll also talk about times that I chose to move outside of Azure and ultimately use a “hybrid” of cloud services. If you are considering Azure for your business, I hope this series will help you learn some new tricks and also avoid some of the issues I had growing my startup. Windows Read the original post on DZone… [...]
[...] What I Learned Building a Startup on Microsoft Cloud Services: Part 1 – Introduction blog post by Liam Cavanagh (posted Feb. 6. [...]
[...] What I Learned Building a Startup on Microsoft Cloud Services: Part 1 – Introduction blog post by Liam Cavanagh (posted Feb. 6. [...]