Redmond, Washington — Microsoft on Tuesday revealed pricing and service-level plans giving details about how it will charge potential customers that wishes to use its Windows Azure cloud computing service when it is released in final form this fall, but making it free for anyone to use before the company begins charging for it in November.
On Tuesday, the software titan announced a variety of pricing options and service-level commitments for Azure, including one that charges purely on consumption and another that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a six-month commitment.
The software maker also confirmed that Azure will be available in the US, Europe and Asia from mid-November.
Launched in October 2008, Azure is a set of enterprise web services hosted on Microsoft’s servers, which finds itself in a new type of business, where it competes with the likes of Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com’s Force.com.
Mark Taylor, director of developer and platform evangelism, said the cloud operating system’s commercial availability of the Windows Azure will be announced at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference to be held in Los Angeles in November, but for now only the pricing announcement would be made at this week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which will be held in New Orleans. Microsoft first announced its Azure plans at last year’s PDC and the product has been available as a free technology preview form since then.
“It will go commercial in November,” he said. “In the first half of the next calendar year, we are going to talk about international availability — about additional data-centers and about additional countries that Azure will be available in.”
He added that customers would be able to specify where their data would be hosted.
Continuing Taylor said that Azure will be offered via a consumption-based pricing model, starting with computing services for $0.12 per hour.
Users will be charged for the time their application is deployed, so “while developing and testing your application you may want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing,” the company said in a blog post.
Microsoft will offer three pricing models for Azure when it starts charging for it at its Microsoft Professional Developers Conference later this year: consumption-based pricing, in which people will only pay for what they use; subscription-based pricing; and volume licensing, so enterprise customers can integrate Azure into existing enterprise agreements with Microsoft, said Microsoft General Manager Doug Hauger.
For Storage, Microsoft will charge $0.15 per gigabyte, billed via average daily storage in GB over a monthly period. Storage transactions will cost $0.01 for every 10,000 transactions.
For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between $0.10 and $0.15 per GB, and will be charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Windows Azure over 30 days.
For SQL Azure, a cloud database, Microsoft is charging $9.99 for a Web Edition, which comprises up to a one-gigabyte relational database; and $99.99 for a Business Edition, which holds up to a 10-gigabyte relational database. For .NET Services — a set of Web-based developer tools for building cloud-based applications — Microsoft is charging $0.15 per 100,000 message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens.
Users who are part of the Microsoft Partner Network will receive a 5 percent promotional discount on Windows Azure compute, SQL Azure, and .Net Services. MSDN Premium members will also be able to build, test, and manage full-scale cloud-based applications. Microsoft will also offer a Development Accelerator promotional offer for those who want to quickly develop and deploy applications.
The company also released details of its service-level agreements (SLAs) for Azure. “As we know, the cloud is not entirely bomb-proof — we have seen some significant outages recently,” Taylor said. “From our viewpoint, we will offer SLA credits against our service levels.”
Microsoft will provide a 10 percent credit if compute connectivity falls below 99.95 percent uptime; a 10 percent credit if role-instance uptime or storage falls below 99.9 percent uptime.
“If we fall below 99 percent availability across anything, we will be providing 25 percent credits,” said Taylor.
At Azure’s commercial launch in November, the cloud computing platform will initially be available in 21 countries that are: the 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, Microsoft will extend commercial Azure 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.
More information about Azure was posted to a Microsoft blog Tuesday.