“Case Studies” are a great tool when you’re evaluating a platform. Having evidence that other companies have deployed Windows Azure, in addition to how they did it, is a good way to plan your own deployments or even just evaluate whether Windows Azure would be a good fit. And we have several case studies you can examine here: ...

I deal with computing architectures by first laying out requirements, and then laying in any constraints for it's success. Only then do I bring in computing elements to apply to the system. As an example, a requirement might be ''world-side availability'' and a constraint might be ''with less than 80ms response time and full HA'' or something ...