Microsoft puts flesh on Azure's bones with pricing details

Microsoft has revealed more details, including pricing, around one of its most significant forays into cloud computing, the Azure Services Platform (ASP).

ASP - a set of online developer services that includes the Windows Azure processing and storage service, the SQL Azure database platform and .NET Services - will become commercially available in the US and UK, along with several other countries, in the fourth quarter of 2009.

With Microsoft traditionally seen as being slow to come cloud computing and outpaced in the field by companies such as Google and Amazon, the launch of ASP marks an important departure for the company as it embraces online services and attempts to reclaim cloud kudos from rivals.

Azure also marks the first time companies will effectively be able to outsource services such as large-scale storage and compute processing to Microsoft.

Using the processing side of Windows Azure, which allows businesses to access computing power to complement or replace their in-house servers for complex processing tasks, will cost businesses $0.12 per service hour.

Azure's storage service will be charged at $0.15 per GB of data per month with an additional $0.01 for every 10,000 transactions - movements of data - within the material stored.

SQL Azure will be available as a web edition, which is charged at $9.99 for a 1GB database, and as a larger-scale business edition, which is available in minimum database sizes of 10GB, charged at $99.99.

In addition, ASP's .NET Services element - an online developer environment that provides tools to help developers build their applications and blocks of code that can be used and modified to create online services - will be charged at $0.15 per 100,000 message operations, when the online application that the developer has built accesses an element of .NET Services such as a tool or chunk of code.

In terms of moving data in and out of ASP to use any Azure service, Microsoft will charge $0.10 per GB of inbound data and $0.15 per GB of outbound data.

Microsoft had previously promised Azure would be "very price competitive" with rivals such as Amazon. It appears to have stuck to its guns, charging roughly parallel pricing to the online retailer.

At launch there will be a pay-as-you-go pricing option for each Azure service, as well as a subscription-based model for businesses with more predictable usage. A volume licensing model is likely to follow, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft said it will offer businesses 10 per cent of their money back if availability drops below 99.95 per cent for connectivity and 99.9 per cent for Azure's processing and storage services. If uptime for either of these falls below 99 per cent, 25 per cent in credit will be offered.

At its commercial launch ASP will be run out of datacentres in Ireland, Singapore and the US, with additional datacentres expected to go live in the first half of 2010.

As well as increasing the number of datacentres it uses and the territories it expects to offer ASP in the future, Microsoft is also planning to bring developer versions of SharePoint and Dynamics CRM to the Azure Web Services portfolio although exact timings are yet to be confirmed.

Microsoft's cloud initiatives don't stop with Azure: the software giant announced yesterday that Office 2010 will be available online and for free.