I've been working with Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services EC2 for a good many months now (almost getting to the years range) and I've seen something over and over that seems troubling.
When I deploy a .NET build into Windows Azure into a web role (or service role) it takes usually 6-15 minute for it to startup. In AWS's EC2 it takes about the same to startup the image and then a minute or two to deploy the app to IIS (pending of course its setup).
However when I boot up an AWS instance with SUSE Linux & Mono to run .NET, I get one of these booted and deploy code to it in about 2-3 minutes (again, pending it is setup).
What is going on with Windows OS images that cause them to take soooo long to boot up in the cloud? I don't want FUD, I'm curious about the specific details of what goes on that causes this. Any specific technical information regarding this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
As announced at PDC, Azure will soon start to offer full IIS on Azure web roles. Somewhere in the keynote demo by Don Box, he showed that this allows you to use the standard "publish" options in Visual Studio to deploy to the cloud very quickly.
If I recall correctly, part of what happens when starting a new Azure role is configuring the network components, and I remember some speaker at a conference mentioning once that that was very time consuming. This might explain why adding additional instances to an already running role is usually faster (but not always: I have seen this take much more than 15 minutes as well on ocassion).
Edit: also see this PDC session.