Should I use Microsoft Azure for a simple gaming web service?

Question

ASP.NET

I'm working on a simple turn-based game for Windows Phone/Windows Store (universal app) and want to add multiplayer capability. I will say right away that I have a big gap in knowledge with web applications and cloud services - I almost never worked with such applications, despite a very long professional experience as a developer.
Once, however, I experimented with a Windows Phone 7 application and an ASP .NET Web service (there was one in VS 2010), everything worked out (then I hosted the service on some free ASP hosting), and it even worked (although I had to tinker with occasional client crash due to unhandled exceptions in auto-generated code).
There was a free Microsoft Azure offer on my BizSpark account page for a long time; I did a little Google research and found out that Microsoft considers Azure the most effective tool for mobile services. Well, it won't take long to try... Registered, created Mobile service, downloaded their sample. Curiously, it even started working (of course, it didn't do without crashes on unhandled exceptions :) ).
But when I looked at the Azure console, I was a little (more precisely, fairly) surprised: the simplest operation of outputting 3 lines ("notes") made about 10 API calls (out of 16667 / day free), while about 350 Kb of traffic took (I note right away - I didn’t understand the sample code, haven’t looked at fiddler yet).
To be honest, I really didn’t like all this: in addition to my possible expenses (and it’s still unknown whether the application will pay off or not), it would be nice to save future users’ mobile traffic ... And these “thick” requests do not affect performance in the best way , plus "the first call is always lumpy" - I don't know why, but on Windows Phone there is a timeout for the first time, and only after restarting the application starts working. Let me remind you that this is not about my code, but about the example that Microsoft Azure issues when creating a Mobile service.
My requirements for the service I need are extremely low:
- it must be written in .NET / C # (you need to use shared code from clients written in C #)
- the functionality should include:
- user registration ("entrance to the room")
- sending messages to users (text messages - chat, and invitations to play)
- sending moves between users who started the game (only one byte needs to be sent)
- handling communication errors and informing clients (i.e. notify) - i.e. a simple sub-service like ping
- I don't need a database as such; well, except to store the results of the games, but this is (yet) optional.
I want to ask experts: what can you advise me? I foresee few clients (I am a realist); maximum (in the best case!) about 50. I would also be very grateful for the source texts of such a simple service.
Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

Shit, with AWS from Amazon, it’s not worth it!