We have deployed to Azure, but I personally haven't been involved with it. And we aren't using VMs at this stage, but are considering it to complement features

We have deployed to Azure, but I personally haven't been involved with it. And we aren't using VMs at this stage, but are considering it to complement features that aren't available in Azure. For example, Reporting Services was not available on Azure (it is now), so we hosted that on another provider which connected to a SQL Azure instance. From what I hear, performance has been pretty good, as has uptime. Though, with targeting non-VM you do run against some limitations. Such as, as you mention, the non-ability to run background tasks. You can in fact run background services on Azure (non-VM), and we have done so for a few of our deployed web apps. You'll need to look into Worker Roles: * http://blogs.msdn.com/b/morebits/archive/2011/01/01/building-windows-azure-service-part5-worker-role-background-tasks-handler.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/morebits/archive/2011/01/01/building... * http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336122.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336122.aspx