Microsoft Azure Scores a Release Date and a Price Tag

By Chelsi Nakano | Published Jul 16, 2009

At this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft (news, site) confirmed the upcoming commercial availability of their cloud services platform, Azure. Then they slapped a price tag on it.

Microsoft's cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year.

Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more. Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database.

Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft's platform, we considered the possibility that the company was "betting the farm on Azure." Do we still think that's the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness. It looks like these collective baby steps lead in one direction: up!