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Windows Azure Platform

Pricing

Overview

You have two basic types of offers to choose from when purchasing a Windows Azure platform subscription. The first type is consumption offers. This type requires no commitment - you pay only for what you use. The second type of offer is a commitment offer that provides a significantly discounted level of service in return for a six month commitment to pay a monthly base fee. Any usage in excess of this amount is charged at our standard consumption rates. Below is a summary of our different plans:

Consumption Offers:

  • Introductory Special - Promotional offer with an amount of Windows Azure Platform services provided each month at no charge. Requires no monthly commitment and is the first plan to choose if you are unsure how much you will use each month. For SQL Azure this offer is only valid for 3 months.
  • Consumption - Flexible “Pay As You Go” plan for all Windows Azure platform services. If you need one or more additional subscriptions that require no monthly commitment, this is the plan for you.
  • MSDN Premium - Promotional offer with a monthly amount of Windows Azure Platform services provided as an added benefit to MSDN premium subscribers. Requires you to be a MSDN Premium subscriber.

Subscription Offers:

  • Development Accelerator Core - Promotional offer provides compute hours, storage, data transfers, Access Control transactions and Service Bus connections at a discounted monthly price for a six month term. This offer is designed to provide developers with the Windows Azure and AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control resources that they need to develop a particular solution or offering. If you think of the developer project lifecycle as being design-develop-deploy-manage, this offer, essentially, fuels the development stage of your project.
  • Development Accelerator Extended - Promotional offer includes Development Accelerator Core plus SQL Azure at a discounted monthly price for a six month term. This offer is for those developers that are including SQL Azure in their solutions and want to purchase both Windows Azure compute and SQL Azure databases in fixed ratios.
  • SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core – Promotional offer available beginning on August 1, 2010 that includes SQL Azure at a discounted monthly price for a six month term. This offer is for developers including SQL Azure in their solutions and wants to purchase SQL Azure by itself or at ratios independent of Windows Azure compute. For customers that desire both Windows Azure compute and SQL Azure but at different ratios than included in the Development Accelerator Extended offer, they should purchase two subscriptions – a Development Accelerator Core and SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core subscription.

For all of our offers except the MSDN Premium offer, we provide members of the Microsoft Partner Network an additional 5% discount on all charges except storage and data transfers.

Please view our comparison table for a summary of our standard offers, our MSDN site for a summary of our MSDN offer or visit our offers page for additional details

Windows Azure Pricing

  • Compute = $0.12 / hour
  • Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
  • Storage transactions = $0.01 / 10K
  • Data transfers (excluding CDN) = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB - ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)*
  • CDN data transfers = $0.15 GB for North America and Europe ($0.20 GB elsewhere)**
  • CDN transactions = $0.01 / 10K**

* No charge for inbound data transfers during off-peak times through October 31, 2010

**CDN rates are effective for all billing periods that begin subsequent to June 30, 2010. All usage for billing periods beginning prior to July 1, 2010 will not be charged.

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Windows Azure Service Level Agreement
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. For storage and CDN, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests. More information on Service Level Agreements.


Measuring Windows Azure Consumption

  • Compute time, measured in service hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Partial compute hours are billed as full hours.
  • Storage, measured in GB: Storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. For example, if a user uploaded 30GB of data and stored it on Windows Azure for a day, her monthly billed storage would be 1 GB. If the same user uploaded 30GB of data and stored it on Windows Azure for an entire billing period, her monthly billed storage would be 30GB. Storage is also metered in terms of storage transactions used to add, update, read and delete storage data. These are billed at a rate of $0.01 for 10,000 (10k) transaction requests
  • Data transfers measured in GB (transmissions to and from the Windows Azure datacenter): Data transfers are charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Azure services via the internet in a given 30-day period. Data transfers within a sub region are free.
  • Transactions, measured as application requests.

SQL Azure Pricing

  • Web Edition:
    • Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month
    • Up to 5 GB relational database = $49.95 / month**
  • Business Edition:
    • Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month
    • Up to 20 GB relational database = $199.98 / month**
    • Up to 30 GB relational database = $299.97 / month**
    • Up to 40 GB relational database = $399.96 / month**
    • Up to 50 GB relational database = $499.95 / month**
  • Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB - ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)*

* No charge for inbound data transfers during off-peak times through October 31, 2010

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SQL Azure Service Level Agreement
SQL Azure customers will have connectivity between the database and our internet gateway. SQL Azure will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. More information on Service Level Agreements.


Measuring SQL Azure Consumption

Web Edition Relational Database includes:

  • Up to 5 GB of T-SQL based relational database*
  • Self-managed DB, auto high availability and fault tolerance
  • Support existing tools like Visual Studio, SSMS, SSIS, BCP
  • Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps

Business Edition DB includes:

  • Up to 50 GB of T-SQL based relational database*
  • Self-managed DB, auto high availability and fault tolerance
  • Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc
  • Support existing tools like Visual Studio, SSMS, SSIS, BCP
  • Best suited for Saas ISV apps, custom Web application, Departmental apps

A monthly fee is charged for each user database of SQL Azure. That database fee is amortized over the month and charge on a daily basis. You pay for the user databases you have on the days you have them. Master databases are not charged.

Windows Azure AppFabric Pricing

Access Control

  • Access Control transactions = $1.99/100K

Service Bus connections

  • $3.99 per connection on a “pay-as-you-go” basis
  • $9.95 for a pack of 5 connections
  • $49.75 for a pack of 25 connections
  • $199 for a pack of 100 connections
  • $995 for a pack of 500 connections

Data transfers

  • Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB - ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)*

* No charge for inbound data transfers during off-peak times through June 30, 2010

These rates for AppFabric are effective for usage beginning in April, 2010. All AppFabric usage prior to April, 2010 will not be charged.

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AppFabric Service Level Agreement
Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for AppFabric are similar to those specified in the Windows Azure SLA. More information on Service Level Agreements


Measuring AppFabric Consumption

AppFabric Service Bus connections can be provisioned individually on a “pay-as-you-go” basis or in a pack of 5, 25, 100 or 500 connections. For individually provisioned connections, you will be charged based on the maximum number of connections you use for each day. For connection packs, you will be charged daily for a pro rata amount of the connections in that pack (i.e., the number of connections in the pack divided by the number of days in the month). You can only update the connections you provision as a pack once every seven days. You can modify the number of connections you provision individually at any time.

For AppFabric Access Control transactions, customers will be charged the actual number of transactions utilized for the billing period (i.e., not in discrete blocks of 100,000 transactions), plus data transfers in or out.

Community Technology Preview (CTP)

Community Technology Preview (CTP) participants that have not yet upgraded to a commercial subscription of the Windows Azure platform will continue to be subject to the following limits:

  • Total compute usage: 2,000 compute hours
  • Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
  • Total storage data transfers: 20GB/day

To prevent a disruption in service, CTP participants from supported countries should upgrade to a commercial subscription. If you are a CTP participant, please monitor the email account associated with your CTP account for upgrade instructions.