Software giant Microsoft gave the world an idea of how much it will charge you for its Windows Azure cloud computing scheme later this year.
Microsoft said it will charge between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte for network bandwidth, 12 cents an hour for computing, 15 cents a gigabyte for storage and 10 cents for every 10,000 storage transactions.
Microsoft won’t introduce the service until the fall, but has other cunning plans up its sleeve, including discounts for six month commitments. Cnet also said that the SQL Azure database will cost $9.99 for the basic Web edition, and $99.9 for the Business Edition – the latter will include a database of up to 10GB.
Funny how companies always price things at $9.99 and $99.99, isn’t it? It just seems so much less than $10 and $100, doesn’t it?
Bob Muglia made the announcement today and said that what makes Windows Azure different is that Microsoft “manages the complexity”. The City of Chicago is using it. Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET services will be commercially available at the Professional Developers Conference later this year.
