Microsoft finally announced the commercial pricing model for Azure. The numbers all look small at first glance, quoted at a very fine granularity of hours and gigs and kilotransactions, but it’s worth doing some multiplication to get real numbers out. $0.12/hour is £646 a year, by Google’s reckoning. That’s slightly more than the cost of a basic dedicated server from one random hosting provider I picked out of the air. Amazon’s EC2 is $0.10/h for their smallest VM, but the next step up is $0.40/h, so you could have three compute units on Azure for less than Amazon’s...