Microsoft has finally lifted the lid on pricing for its Windows Azure Cloud Computing platform as it elaborated on the role The Cloud will play in the firm's strategic direction. Microsoft will offer three pricing models for Azure: consumption-based pricing, in which people will only pay for what they use; subscription-based pricing; and volume licensing, so enterprise customers can integrate Azure into existing enterprise agreements with Microsoft.
For consumption-based pricing, Microsoft is charging 12 cents per hour for compute infrastructure; 15 cents per gigabyte for storage; and 10 cents per 10,000 transactions for storage purposes. For the SQL Azure Cloud database, Microsoft is charging $9.99 for a Web Edition, which comprises up to a one-gigabyte relational database; and $99.99 for a Business Edition, which holds up to a 10-gigabyte relational database.
For .NET Services, Microsoft is charging 15 cents per 100,000 message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens. Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at 10 cents per gigabyte for data coming in and 15 cents per gigabyte for data going out, according to Microsoft. Microsoft will offer a 15% to 30% discount to developers and resellers who sign on for six months or more. It plans to unveil pricing for corporate customers in the second half of its fiscal year, which began in July.
At Azure's commercial launch in November, the infrastructure will be available in the US, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. In 2010, additional countries will come on board, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore and Taiwan.
A combination play
"We're building these capabilities into the Windows System Center and Azure platform to enable people to build these scale-out apps," said Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business. "The Cloud is not just an infrastructure play. It's the combination of infrastructure and applications, and Microsoft brings those together.
“To fully take advantage, applications will need to be built in a way so they can scale out as a part of The Cloud. And most apps today are not built that way. So, there's a great opportunity as we move to The Cloud to build applications that take advantage of the scale-out, and it's a large part of what Microsoft does,” he explained. “One of the key differentiators for Microsoft in The Cloud world is that we will work to help developers and help our partners build these next generation scale-out applications. It's one of the things we do.
“It used to be hard to write graphical apps. We created Visual Basic and made it easy. As we move to The Cloud and the Cloud environment, its hard today to build these scale-out applications. We're building the capabilities into the Windows System Center and Azure platform to enable people to build scale-out apps, and also of course into the tools in Visual Studio to make it possible.”
Muglia said that Microsoft's objective was to enable customers to move to whatever version of The Cloud suited them best “Whether they want to run on their own data centre and take advantage of virtualisation in that, whether they want to build an on-premises Cloud environment for their own environment, a private Cloud, and take that as a part of their data centre, ultimately a very large part of their datacentre to run their business applications on premises,” he said. “Whether it's to enable hosters to take technologies such as Windows Server and System Center or Visual Studio to build their own public cloud environment, and of course Microsoft Windows Azure environment that we'll be providing to build public Clouds.
“Our goal is to take the learning that we have in enabling these cloud-based deployments and to bring them back and forth. So everything from on premises through to Windows Azure takes a learning from Windows Azure and bring it back into Windows Server and System Center, take the learning from Windows Server and System Center and put it in Windows Azure and then enable our partners to help drive forward and deploy these environments for our customers. So again, the power of choice.”
