I’d like to announce that Cloud Provisioning & Billing 1.0 (CPB) has been released to the web. CPB is primarily targeted at service providers wanting to sell Windows Azure Platform services and resources in combination with their own and application vendors wanting to give customers an ability to customize their applications before they get deployed to Windows Azure Platform but still controlling the deployment on customers’ behalf.

CPB uses Windows Azure Service Management API and abstracts almost every operation in it from application developers to implement something that is similar to a combination of Windows Azure portal and MOCP portal adding few features that do not get exposed very well through either of these. CPB tries to automate as many operations as possible but operations that still have to be performed manually with absence of billing API and few others can be done by an Operator, a special role provided by CPB. Developer, another role provided, can subscribe to packages which service provider configures and which can include both Microsoft’s and provider’s custom services and resources.

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Once fully subscribed, Developer can deploy cloud application to the resources provisioned and control the deployment in much the same way as it is done through Windows Azure portal.

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Developer still maintains an ability to use 3rd party tools to diagnose and monitor the applications through the use of custom API certificate if one is provided by the developer to CPB.

Service providers can bill developers using CPB as their deployment portal in whichever way they want – either by looking at their Azure bill listing all resources used by each developer and adding a premium for value-add services or simply charging a subscription fee for each package or simply charging a flat fee.

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CPB ships with Paypal integration so the developers can start paying for the services utilized through CPB once it’s deployed by the provider. Integration with custom billing systems can also be implemented. CPB also provides integration with Windows Live ID so there's no need to implement custom identity system.

I’d like to thank the team at Murano Software for their tremendous contribution in making this release happen.