With Azure Pricing out in the market, came across a very useful web site that will allow any small or mid scale business to work out the total infrastructure investment required to set up a business model around cloud computing initiatives.
Visit this site to find out the TCO
Also there is an excellent presentation given by David Chapell on different cloud offerings available in today’s world.
Microsoft is charging US$0.12 per hour for compute infrastructure; $0.15 per gigabyte for storage; and $0.10 per 10,000 transactions for storage purposes. For SQL Azure, a cloud database, Microsoft is charging $9.99 for a Web Edition, which comprises up to a 1 gigabyte relational database; and $99.99 for a Business Edition, which holds up to a 10 gigabyte relational database. For .NET Services — a set of Web-based developer tools for building cloud-based applications — Microsoft is charging $0.15 per 100,000 message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens.
Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 per gigabyte for data coming in and $0.15 per gigabyte for data going out.
The interesting thing is Microsoft is offering the infrastructure not only in US but also in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.
The pricing model could have been more competitive in comparison to Amazon cloud offerings. Amazon pricing starts from $0.125 per hour (small instance). This definitely comes with 1 CPU.
If i read it correctly, advantage of Amazon EC2 offering is that you pay by instance hour, and there are different flavors of instance available for different needs of business. So if anyone needs a instance with more CPU packed in then they have high CPU extra large instance.
But if the application is CPU centric then i find Amazon pricing attractive, because for high CPU extra large instance it charges $1.20 per hour – per instance, this is equipped with 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform.
One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.
So if i get 20 EC2 then 1.20 / 20 will give me = 0.06$ per hour per CPU. I am still not clear with Azure pricing specifically on hardware configuration of the machine – more importantly # of CPU.
Amazon also offers a discount pricing if hardware is purchased in a lease mode for 1 yr or 3 yr term. The high CPU extra large instance when reserved in lease mode for 1 yr will be available for $0.24 per hour that will cost 0.012$ per CPU.
