Among many other benefits of moving or building your web applications in cloud, for me I think the most important benefit we get is scalability. When it comes to web applications there are two approaches for scalability. Scale out - This means we increase the number of running instances of the application with a load balancer which distributes the requests among those instances Scale up - This means we increase the physical resources on a single application instance, for example we can increase the RAM of the hosted machine In reality preferred way of web application scalability should be to scale out. Because there are obvious hardware limitations in scale up approach. Bearing that in mind if we look at what Windows Azure provides out of the box, for a certain level it supports scale up approach and it has a great amount of support for scale out approach. Scaling your application out Windows Azure supports both automatic and manual scale out of the application.