Windows Azure Benefits for MSDN: New and improved

If you have an MSDN Premium or Ultimate subscription, hopefully you’re aware of and have perhaps taken advantage of a free monthly allotment of Windows Azure benefits.  If you haven’t provisioned your account yet, well now’s the time, because the benefits just got better – with a doubling of compute hours, significant increase in storage (triple of that previously for MSDN Premium subscribers), and an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth allotment… and here’s the best part:

Visual Studio Professional MSDN subscribers are now included!

The updated benefits chart appears below, and for a great way to get started with Azure, try your hand at the Rock Paper Azure Challenge running through May 13.  You’ll get your feet wet with cloud computing, have some fun, and perhaps even win an XBox 360/Kinect bundle!

¹ For Ultimate subscribers this is an increase of 2GB; for new Premium subscribers, it’s a decrease of 2GB from the previous plan.  Existing Premium subscribers will also receive the 5GB benefit.
² There is a reduction in number of access control transactions from the previous plans (1 million transactions); however, current plan holders will retain that benefit.
³ There is no longer a distinction in bandwidth allotment between Europe/North America and Asia Pacific.

Those of you with existing MSDN Ultimate and Premium subscriptions may be wondering what you now get.  All of the existing MSDN Premium and Ultimate Subscribers are automatically transitioned to the new MSDN Ultimate offer.  That means a doubling(!) of compute benefits, an increase in storage, and as you can see from footnote (2), you also retain the previous benefit of 1,000,000 access control transactions.

These benefits are in place for as long as your retain the MSDN subscription (although we do reserve the right to modify the monthly benefit at some point in the future – like we just did ).