Microsoft today unveiled pricing details for its Azure services platform — possibly because customers were reluctant to build an application on the beta platform without knowing what it may one day cost them. The platform is Microsoft’s leap into the clouds, and it’s an impressive first step, at least on paper, complete with competitive pricing and lots of concessions designed to get enterprise customers to shift over their IT operations. It also has the potential to become a platform as a service, which would enable far greater levels of control than current platforms, such as those offered by Google; or those tied to applications like Force.com, which allow programmers to build more apps that connect with Salesforce.com; or Quickbase, which does the same for users of Intuit’s software.

What It Is:

* Windows Azure is a cloud operating system on which developers can build using .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, Python and other languages. Doug Hauger, Windows Azure GM, said that in the future Microsoft will offer an admin model that will allow developers access to the virtual machine, although they will not have to manually allocate hardware resources as they might with a traditional infrastructure-as-a-service offering such as Amazon’s EC2.
* SQL Azure is Microsoft’s relational database in the cloud.
* .NET Services is Microsoft’s platform as a service built on the Azure OS.

What It Costs:

* There are three pricing models: consumption-based, whereby a customer pays for what they use; subscription-based, with discounts for those committing to six months of use; and as of next July, volume licensing for enterprise customers that want to take existing Microsoft licenses into the cloud.
* Azure compute is 12 cents per service hour (half a cent less than Amazon’s Windows-based cloud).
* Azure’s storage service costs 15 cents per GB of data per month, with an additional penny for every 10,000 transactions, which are the movements of data within the stored material.
* .NET Services platform costs 15 cents for every 100,000 times the applications built on .Net Services accesses a tool or chunk of code.
* Moving data costs 10 cents per GB of inbound data and 15 cents per GB of outbound data.
* SQL Azure is $9.99 for up to a 1 GB relational database, and $99.99 for up to a 10 GB relational database.

What the web is saying:
The Register: Microsoft has announced pricing for Azure that marginally undercuts Amazon on raw computing for Windows-based clouds but remains more expensive than the mega book warehouse’s Linux option.
The Wall Street Journal: …Microsoft had priced its Azure service “aggressively,” suggesting the company is serious about establishing itself as a cloud computing provider, despite qualms about the impact the move could have on its own business model which is overwhelmingly reliant on traditional packaged software sales.
ZDNet: Do you think Microsoft is just rebranding its existing datacenter software as “private-cloud”-capable? Or does Microsoft’s private-cloud tools and software give it a leg up over Amazon and Google?
Ars Technica: Microsoft may have a tough time convincing developers that Azure is worth their time, and while pricing is important, it all comes down to trust.
The NYTimes: Critics have charged that Microsoft took a long time to prepare a cloud computing offering, giving rivals – even a bookseller like Amazon – a chance to grab the early attention in this market. Such tardiness has cost Microsoft dearly in the past, especially in search, where Google’s brand remains dominant. Read more…

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