Today, at WPC, we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform. Here are few highlights from the announcement.

  • Commercial availability at PDC 2009 in November.
  • SQL Azure will be available as a cloud-based relational database platform built on SQL Server.
  • Free until the release in November. Now is the time to go check out the free CTP.

You can sign-up for the free CTP account for Windows Azure & .NET Services at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx. SQL Azure will be available later this summer.

The basic pricing that we announced today is in the table below. As part of the Microsoft Partner Network, partners receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount.

Windows Azure SQL Azure .NET Services
  • Compute @ $0.12 / hour
  • Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
  • Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K
  • Web Edition - Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99
  • Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99
  • Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at  $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

More details on pricing are available here on Windows Azure Team Blog.