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 mid-range VM.
So it’s largely in the same ballpark as standard hosting, with the granular scaling benefits you’d expect from utility cloud rental. Assuming once Azure compute unit is about one little server’s worth of CPU, which is, I suppose, a big assumption – but most application deployments are handled on a ‘one function per box’ basis regardless of the actual computing requirement.
So in summary: Everybody who thought it would be crazy expensive was wrong, everybody who thought it would be really cheap was kidding themselves. No surprise.
But there’s one key benefit that – I think – is underestimated in assessing Azure, though: it takes the entire system management layer out from under your software. Every dedicated or virtual host you operate in a conventional hosting environment, you’re responsible for patching the OS, managing reboots, clearing out log files, managing backup strategy, and so on. An Azure ‘compute unit’ box is isolated from OS and hardware concerns. If the hard drive in the server MS is currently running it on dies, an identical compute unit in a different box should pop up to replace it right away. And it’s the scaling cost of the additional overhead of managing extra server instances that limits the appeal of even utility computing solutions like EC2.
So while the pricing may be comparable to dedicated or virtual-dedicated hosting, the granularity and the administrative scalability suggest that MS is doing something genuinely interesting.