We have a fairly large application running on a small web farm with Sql Server replication. Lately the sales team have become obsessed with wanting to sell the solution as a cloud based product as they think it sounds better.
We have begun migrating our dynamic media content to azure blob storage for images, videos, etc. but we cannot move to Azure with Sql Azure as it is as we use features such as FileStream and Full Text Indexing for searching documents. Also from what I can understand you cannot bring backups locally and run in Sql Server which is a fundamental part of our development process and bug fixing.
One suggestion is to move to the Virtual Machines that are in preview when they are released, I guess with all my research I am struggling to see if that is going to be of benefit to us over our current setup. I can see the advantages of blob storage for geo-replication as we have users in China, Mexico and India.
My question is is it worth going to a virtual machine in Windows Azure over our current setup, if it's not does anyone know any dates when Sql Azure will support fulltext indexing?
Many thanks for any thoughts/your own experiences with this.