If you speak to Microsoft, they'll give you a number of active accounts, but what are those accounts actually running? It could be a collection of Hello World ASP.NET sites, or perhaps small exciting web start-ups, or maybe even the beginnings of large corporate moves to the cloud! I guess what I really wanted to know was who is using Azure but that's a much harder question to answer, so we'll stick to what for now.

My super awesome comrade Theo Spears attempted to answer this by trawling every IP address in the Azure public range, and trying to pull down the source of the opening HTML page. The results were interesting:

There were 118,528 public Azure IP addresses that were hit and from these came 8,044 http sites that were up and running; meaning that out of that batch of public IP's as many as 6.8% were running an http site that could be trawled.

At the end of the process there was a lot of info to sift through, but sites found included:

Pretty interesting for a few years of operation. This certainly doesn't paint a picture of runaway success, but then I don't think I've ever heard Microsoft push that. What they have tried to push is an awareness and adoption of Platform as a Service, and I guess only time will tell if their push will be successful. With the recent high profile purchase of Heroku and growing appreciation of the benefits of PaaS maybe those numbers will look different in a year's time.