Platform for Mobile Application Web Services

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

Have utilised Amazon Web Services (with EC2 Windows and RDS SQL Server) for Plan B but now looking at a Plan C which is a much larger scale scenario. Looking at a social media kind of application (though not on the scale of Facebook etc. obviously).

So far I've been doing some research and found these to be all viable options:

Couchbase
Azure

One of the articles I read:

How to choose a database for your mobile apps | InfoWorld

Azure is the one I am most attracted to as I'm a Microsoft man, but is it worthwhile looking at Big Data alternatives at this stage or will Azure allow us to scale up as necessary?

[SimonMac]

Have utilised Amazon Web Services (with EC2 Windows and RDS SQL Server) for Plan B but now looking at a Plan C which is a much larger scale scenario. Looking at a social media kind of application (though not on the scale of Facebook etc. obviously).

So far I've been doing some research and found these to be all viable options:

Couchbase
Azure

One of the articles I read:

How to choose a database for your mobile apps | InfoWorld

Azure is the one I am most attracted to as I'm a Microsoft man, but is it worthwhile looking at Big Data alternatives at this stage or will Azure allow us to scale up as necessary?

I know some systems that are using Azure and are scaling up quite fast, have you tried running some numbers through their pricing calculator?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

I know some systems that are using Azure and are scaling up quite fast, have you tried running some numbers through their pricing calculator?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/

I've had a look at the pricing model and for Proof of Concept it looks great... However, I have no experience in Big Data and how these things can scale up so quickly. I guess if that happens though then at least I'll know its successful and I can get some contractors in to sort out the problem