Microsoft prices up Azure

 

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By Benny Har-Even

Posted on 14 Jul 2009 at 15:22

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Azure will be commercially available by the end of the year, with prices based on micropayments for compute time and storage.

Jon Honeyball on Microsoft Azure

Mark Taylor, director of developer and platform evangelism for Microsoft, says that the pricing model would be the first step to enable Azure to "become a utility in and out of the enterprise".

Taylor says that while cloud computing had many definitions, the most crucial for enterprises was "monetisation" - as it enabled them to increase their computing power without having to heavily increase their capital expenditure.

The pricing model is broken down into three parts for use of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET services as follows:

Windows Azure:

Compute - $0.12 per hour

Storage - $0.15 per GB

Transaction - $0.01 per 10,000

SQL Azure:

Web Edition (1GB database) - $9.99 per month

Business Edition (10GB Database) $99.99 per month

.Net Services:

Messages - $0.15 per 100,000 message operations

In addition, Microsoft also announced details of the Service Level Agreements for Azure, saying it will offer a 10% credit in the event that compute connectivity falls below 99.95%. Role instance uptime and storage availability qualify for 10% credits if they fall below 99.9%.

The service will be available for 21 countries by the fourth quarter of the year, taking in Europe, the US, India, Australia and Japan. It will initially be available in English only. The data centres will be located in the US, Dublin and Singapore.

Microsoft says that companies will be able to specify which location they wished their data to be housed at, to meet either performance or legal requirements.