Windows Azure’s Pricing Model Discourages Small-Scale Apps (for now?)
The death of Silverlight Streaming (a free hosting service provided by Microsoft) made me finally think through the cost of hosting small apps and sites on Windows Azure.
Although Azure’s pricing model might make sense for Enterprise scenarios, the math doesn’t seem to add up for smaller-scale applications, or for developers who wish to evaluate the Azure platform.
Let’s work through the TCO of a simple site I considered moving to Windows Azure.
LOL+Arts Exhibit in San Francisco
I’m delighted to hear that the FractLOL, which blends Deep Zoom and LOLCats into a mosaic of hilarity, is going to be exhibited at LOL+Arts, a cross-media exhibit of artworks inspired by the LOLCat phenomenon. The exhibit will be open in San Francisco on October 23rd, and will benefit Partners in Reading and their work on adult literacy.
To celebrate, I’ve updated the FractLOL to Silverlight 2 RTW, and fully intend to subject you to it again. Here. Right now.
Note: Silverlight Streaming has now been fully updated to Silverlight RTW. The FractLOL can be viewed on the Mac or PC, so long as you install the lightweight Silverlight 2 plug-in from Microsoft. [Updated on the 2nd of November.]
I’ve also updated the FractLOL page on this blog with a bit more information about how this came to be.
Here are links to the LOL+Arts Site, curator Marianne Goldin’s blog, and the announcement on icanhascheezburger.com.
I love this image they used to promote the event on icanhascheezburger, and wish I had a high-res version for my desktop wallpaper:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few months, it’s that if you want to drive traffic to your blog, technical articles can be pretty good, but you should really just save yourself the time and energy and just add cats.
LOLCats, akshuly.
I maded you a FractLOL…
… and then I Silverlit it!
Is alternately a LOLQuilt, a ROFLMosaic, or a Deep LOL! :)
Here is the full screen version.
Click, drag, shift-click and use the mouse wheel to see that the image is made of over 10,000 LOLCats (there are 2,442 unique images here).
How this came to be?
The kittehs are from the very awesum icanhascheezburger.com which I love and will link to again because I hope they will also find this awesum and not tell me to make it go away.
The photomosaic was generated using AndreaMosaic, a utility for making fun images like this one.
The output of AndreaMosaic got processed by Deep Zoom Composer and turned into a Silverlight app.
And then uploaded to Silverlight Streaming which lets me host these kittehs on the intarwebs without bringing mai wee server to its knees (i hope i hope i hope).
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