To expect customers to pay for resources (e.g. instances) when they are not being used goes against the very essence/promise of the cloud - only paying for what you use! It is understood that a MS VM is the most granular level of resource that MS has to offer, which explains the current pricing structure. However, this can be addressed by keeping a large pool of VMs always running, and allowing customers to essentially 'rent' cycles on them, as needed, according to customer demand. Not only does this offer customers a more affordable cloud offering and fit nicely with the cloud promise, but also it offers devs a way to have IMMEDIATE access to cloud compute nodes, rather than incuring the expense of spinning up VMs (e.g. minutes) to meet demand - which is a deal breaker for many product/platform scenarios where performance is critical and demand is highly variable.

Agreed. Basically, we need as much LINQ operator support as possible - the more the better. To expect devs to not need to be able to query ATS is not realistic. And SQL Azure is NOT the answer!!

I cannot express enough how important and needed this feature is for software frameworks/platforms (best designed around cloud platforms). Also, note that there are a handful of other top posted issues that are basically requesting the same thing. MS - please offer this soon!

i believe azure needs to go even further with this very important feature. customers should not have to pay for unused compute cycles - agreed. however, devs should be able to run their code *immediately*, when needed, avoiding the time cost of spinning up VMs, which takes minutes! if this was accomplished, then devs could provide *demand-scale* computational and algorithmic services! (e.g. think search engine - where you need N compute nodes NOW and you cant wait to spin up VMs). MS could offer this by having several VMs already running, and devs simply write a Task class that gets executed within N existing VM instances (as specified by dev, based on demand). MS would track the execution time on the VM and charge accordingly. however, once complete, the VM is available for the next customer to run their Task. this would not only achieve what others have desired on this thread, but would also enable *immediate* scale, on demand. PLEASE offer this!

After working with Azure Tables for a long time now, i have realized the great need for this feature!