16.14. Pricing and SLA
Most cloud computing platforms only charge you for what you use, and Windows Azure is no exception. Microsoft says that free trials will be on offer for developers to experiment with Azure. Table 16-1 lists the prices. I've also included a brief summary of the current SLA agreement.
Alan Dean (one of the organizers of the UK Alt Net conference and REST architecture expert) suggested to me this could lead to financial reviews being carried out on code (as if you didn't have enough to worry about without accountants as well). For example, unnecessary use of viewstate could result in a big bill at the end of the month.
| Service | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Windows Azure | Compute @ $0.12/hour
Storage @ $0.15/GB stored Storage transactions @ $0.01/10K Bandwidth $0.10 in/$0.15 out/GB |
| SQL Azure | Web edition: Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
Business edition: Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99 Bandwidth : $0.10 in/$0.15 out/GB |
| .NET Services | Messages @ $0.15/100,000 message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens |
| All | Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in/$0.15 out/GB |
| Source: www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx | |
Azure employs a pricing model similar to other cloud-computing suppliers such as Amazon. I was a little disappointed that Microsoft was not more innovative in this respect, and as you can see, it could be quite tricky to work out how much your application will actually cost you (particularly with limited analysis support at present).
The Windows Azure site lists the following regarding SLA agreement:
"Windows Azure has separate SLAs for compute and storage. For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and guarantee that 99.9% of the time we will detect within two minutes when a role instance's process is not running and initiate corrective action. For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway."
www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx