This is a big week for Microsoft when it comes to the cloud. First, the company debuted Office 2010, which made a move towards the browser with cloud-based versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Today, Microsoft is announcing the business model and launch timing for Azure, the company’s much hyped cloud operating system. The platform also includes a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure, and connectivity and interoperability with .NET Services.
Microsoft says that Azure will be offered for purchase through a consumption-based pricing model and will try to continue to offer promotional discounts to enterprise customers. Pricing for Azure’s OS is $0.12 cents an hour for computing and $0.15 cents per Gigabyte per month for storage. SQL Azure will offer a basic $9.99 per month plan and a $99.99 business edition, which has a database capacity of up to ten gigabytes.
Microsoft also announced that Azure will begin to be commercially available at its Professional Developers Conference, which takes place in mid-November. Azure was announced last fall, and developers have already been testing the cloud based OS via Microsoft’s Community Technology Preview.
Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie has been saying that Azure will establish Microsoft’s place in the cloud, especially given the dual strength of Microsoft’s platforms and applications and because of its lengthy experience serving both the consumer and enterprise spaces.
The cloud computing space is a promising and gigantic industry in the future. Microsoft is definitely making the right steps with Azure — and let’s hope they continue to make good decisions like Bing and etc. Btw Leena, thanks for the article
- Darren at AdExcel dot Com
Microsoft seems to make all their things right nowadays!
Except for IE8
What’s wrong with IE8? It is much faster and more standards-compliant than IE7. Still lags behind Firefox though
Yes it’s more standards compliant but it runs much slower than FF and generally runs like crud for me.
Not to mention it causes conflicts and application crashes with some other apps.
I think IE8 is fantastic
I use IE8 all the time
I have started using IE8 recently and surprisingly found it to be pretty good.
I wonder what Microsoft’s existing hosting partners think about this initiative?
Can you guys do a comparison to Amazon? I know its not apples-to-apples but still, a comparison would be useful.
whoops, replied to the wrong thing. Oh well…
The biggest draw to Azure will be the SQL cloud services by far. Amazon’s SDBis quite obscure to work with and requires all new programming. MS SQL is easy to work with, this will be their niche I believe.
Yes, but Amazon partner with Oracle now and you can use Oracle DB server within your virtual image on Amazon. Thus MS SQL being a conventional RDBMS (as is Oracle too) can’t be considered a differentiator here.
There is a big difference between an Oracle instance on Amazon and SQL on Azure. In the former case, you have to manage your own instance as a customer. With SQL on Azure MS manages the SQL instance and you get scalability for ‘free’ — in marketing jargon anyways
Disagree,
Sorry…I “disagree”
Free scalability is the one thing you absolutely DO NOT get with SQL Azure. A SQL Azure database is capped at 10GB.
-Jamie
10GB is a memory stick, not a commercial database. Way too small!
Database size is only one factor of scalability, and not always the most important. I worked for a startup that was using 5 instances of SQL server to try and manage traffic for a website receiving 1.5M page views a day. The database was less than 10GB.
So you do get scalability, but if the size of your database is the factor then it’ll cost you more. I’d like to know what the cost of scale is when you exceed the 10GB limit. My first guess is basic == SQL Standard Edition and business == Enterprise edition. So at 9.99/month for standard and 99.99 a month for enterprise I’d say that’s actually pretty cheap compared to managing things yourself. Especially when you take into account what it cost (bandwidth, rack space, hardware for the database, hardware for the supporting infrastructure, software licenses, etc) to host a database in house. Cost isn’t the only factor, but for a lot of smaller companies it is and compared to the cost of doing it yourself, this is a bargain.
Looks like 9.99 only buys you 1GB and 99.99 is for 10 GB. But it’s still cheaper than acquiring all the hardware/software and maintaining it yourself.
You can use MS SQL Server on Amazon’s EC2. We’re using it and are pretty happy with the result. Technically, SQL cloud service may be very different from MS SQL server, running within EC2 virtual image, but from developer’s perspective the difference is minimal: you’re still using MS SQL.
Microsoft’s competitive advantage here is pricing. You may get started with SQL Azure for just $10 per month, which is much less than Amazon’s EC2 Windows pricing.
WIlliam,
On the surface I see why people view SQL Azure as a differentiator but there are LOTS of problems with it. Namely the artificial limits – max DB size is 10GB.
With a normal on-premise database what happens if you only have a 10GB drive and you fill it up? Simple, you plug in another drive. You can’t do that with SQL Azure, instead you need to rewrite your app – that is SQL Azure’s achilles heel.
-Jamie
I actually think the real differentiator is .Net Services. Nobody else has got anything remotely similar and its capabilities are pretty jaw dropping.
-Jamie
What’s Apple got to do with this?
I’m sure they are happy.
After going and talking to European ISP and consultants, no one was very keen on the idea os MSFT owning the cloud as well and most preferred not to deal with MSFT at all on the other side of the pond. I am not sure if the Azure SQL 10 GB is good enough for most big companies and $99 for 19 GB is a lot. At the moment I can get a 1CPU MS SQL for $99 for the standard and $300 for the pro version. I don’t like the price, but I need to do more calc here.
10 Gb, not 19Gb, typo
Did u mean 0.12 cents / CPU hour?
Probably not, considering amazon charges you by the physical hour. If the instance is running, you get charged.
Sounds like Microsoft is keeping the puters puting..LOL
Interesting…..Is Azure similar in concept to Chrome?
A categorical “No”.
No. Chrome OS is a browser running on top of a Linux core in which all your activities revolve around the browser. Meant for netbooks/tablets, for people whose computing life revolves around the browser.
Azure and Amazon are more direct comparisons, in which they allow for enterprises (not consumers) to develop applications that execute in their mega web servers that will scale based on usage and demand. So you don’t have the hardware limitations you would otherwise have.
chome os is similar to microsoft gazelle…Azure is on a different level than the two.
originally Sql Data Services (sds) was billed as a web service, but now it seems to have gone more in the direction of a traditional database + hosting. For a cloud database with REST, javascript, java, and now iPhone APIs (coming soon), check out http://nextdb.net
What’s your point here – the SQL offering in Azure – available shortly – is SQL Server – but it has a REST API (ASP.NET Data Services) in front of it. You can get pretty much full power of SQL server from the REST API – though the more you want to do – aside from basic CRUD – the farther away you get from a clean REST implementation. So you can totally interact with SQL Server from ANY platform that supports HTTP and the basic verbs PUT, POST, DELETE, GET
Azure is horrendous name for business cloud computing offerings. just adding more confusion to the cloud.
how is that? please explain
If anyone wants to see a comparison of amazon, app engine and Azure, I have a deck that I published a few months back:
http://www.many...whats-going-on/
I haven’t updated it to include the queues from App Engine (which I should be getting around to shortly), but it’s an honest assessment of the major cloud vendors.
This is the event of an epic scale, people. No kidding.
How does this compare to force.com?
I hope not, but after Bing, Office 2010 and now this, something inside keeps yelling “Novell”.
Is there any information listed as to how they are going to price the Azure .Net Service Bus?
Its not that I don’t trust Microsoft with my business operations data, I don’t. Thats not what concerns me. What concerns me is the f*ing “government” and other criminal organizations seeking to rip me off.
IMO the cloud is for public information and education only. If you are too stupid (includes cheap) to maintain your own information infrastructure, then you’ll soon enough be parted from your assets…
All this from a company that cannot produce a secure browser or many other secure applications and who keeps a multitude of employees busy writing patches to the security problems that others uncover and/or exploit.
I am surprised that no one, no one has raised the issue of keep YOUR data secure in a Cloud schema…
So go ahead boys and girls, allow the wolf into the henhouse yet again ….
Tch! Tch!
Such Naiveté
“Be not the first the new to try, nor yet the last the old to put aside”
Caveat Emptor