Today at the World Partner Conference WPC Microsoft’s cloud vision took one step closer to the sky after announcing how much it will cost to run applications and store information in the Windows Azure Platform. Here is the run down:
Windows Azure
Computing: $0.12 per hour
Storage: $0.15 per gigabyte stored
Storage transaction: $0.10 per 10K
Bandwidth: $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte
SQL Azure
Web Edition Database, incl. up to 1 GB relational database: $9.99
Business Edition Database, incl. up to 10 GB relational database: $99.99
Bandwidth (both): $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte
.NET Services
Messages: $0.15 per 100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Bandwidth: $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte
(numbers courtesy of Todd Bishop)
When Windows Azure Platform goes live in November it will be available U.S., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. Local-currency pricing will be available at that time.
In March 2010, the list of countries will extend to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore and Taiwan, with other countries to follow thereafter.
The numbers against Windows Azure are similar to other services out there aka Amazon, but one thing that struck me was the SQL Azure with its $9.99 monthly fee is much more familiar to the database services that traditional database services run. One could argue that the relational database provided by SQL Azure is far more valuable compared to Windows Azure Table storage (blob storage).