A major announcement was made today at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. After a long wait, we finally have the pricing for Azure which I am happy to report is very competitive with other cloud service provider offerings.
Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services will have consumption-based pricing when they become commercially available at the Professional Developers Conference 2009. Partners and customers can start building on the community technology preview (CTP) for free today at http://www.windowsazure.com.
Windows Azure
Compute
$0.12 per hour
Storage
$0.15 per gigabyte stored
Storage transaction
$0.01 per 10K
Bandwidth
$0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte
SQL Azure
Web Edition Database, includes up to 1 GB relational database
$9.99
Business Edition Database, includes up to 10 GB relational database
$99.99
Bandwidth (both)
.NET Services
Messages
$0.15 per 100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Service-level agreements (SLAs)
Compute Connectivity: 99.95 percent guarantee
Storage: 99.9 percent guarantee
Automated Service Management: automatically re-instantiates your application so you don't have to worry about it, giving you peace of mind
I must say, I am strongly dissapointed with a pricing. I have been preparing for Azure instead of dedicated servers and at the moment (very rough calculation) it seems that Azure would be about twice more expensive.
Bandwith alone (in our case around 2000GB monthly) would cost almost $300 which is a price of a decent server with 2000GB of bandwith.
I know one have to deduct cost of maintenance, but still ...
We agonized a lot over getting the pricing model right. Our research, as well as that of industry analysts, indicates that capital costs are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to calculating the total cost of ownership for an application. Roughly speaking for every $1 you spend on initial costs, $7 is spent on maintaining and operating the application. I think I read another study a while back that software licences only account for 6% of IT budgets - the rest went to server and network hardware, and of course, staff for development, maintenance and operations. Azure pricing is pretty competitive with other vendors such as Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing) and Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html). Now of course as vendors, we need to make a money, so there is a profit margin worked into the model. It is quite possible that by implementing virtualization, streamlining internal processes, hiring highly skilled staff, aggressive and pervasive automation and monitoring of your environments, data center design, and leveraging your own company's purchasing power you can get the TCO for your own data centers very low, but again, our studies show that many clients are no where near the level of operational excellence that cloud computing vendors, including Azure, can offer.
I totally and completely understand your point, however for a small company like mine (2-3 developers being also architects, designers and administrators) TCO calculates differently. We currently hire three (not three thousands!) servers and cost of Azure seems to be prohibitive (as is Amazon or Google).
Shame, because I like the idea :)
Are you a Microsoft partner? We have this program called BizSpark (http://www.bizspark.com), which provides all of our software for free for three years or while your company's revenues are under $1 million. Once you hit this milestone, you make a ridiculously low payment like $100.
There are also some Azure specific promotional offers:
Partner discount. As part of the Microsoft Partner Network, partners will receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount on Windows Azure compute, SQL Azure and .NET Services.
MSDN Premium subscriber promotions. MSDN Premium subscribers will receive resources to develop and test their cloud-based applications.
Development accelerator promotional offer. Two promotional offers enable rapid development and accelerate cloud deployment:
– Core, includes Windows Azure compute hours and storage, .NET Services messages, and bandwidth in the base unit
– Extended, includes Windows Azure compute hours and storage, SQL Azure database, and .NET Services messages and bandwidth in the base unit.