Microsoft has released the pricing and SLA commitments for their Azure cloud offering, currently in limited beta testing and scheduled to be generally available for commercial use this November.

The company is distinguishing services as belonging to either Windows Azure, SQL Azure, or .NET services and has distinct pricing for each (just as Amazon distinguishes pricing between EC2 and S3... although, as we'll see, the comparisons are inexact). Essentially, however, this is what you are looking at in all three realms:

• Compute Cycles - $0.12/hr


• Storage - $0.15/GB/month


• Bandwidth - $0.10/GB in / $0.15/GB out


• Database Instance - $9.99 for 1GB


• Messages - $0.15/100K message operations

You can find the complete breakdown by offering and the SLA specification on the Azure website here.

None of this looks terribly dissimilar from Amazon Web Services pricing for similar functions, but many of the specifics that we are familiar with from experience with Amazon are left unspecified... what exactly does an Azure compute cycle consist of in terms of VRAM, cores, etc? SimpleDB is not SQL Server and SQS are not .NET services... how do you compare the price/function directly, even if the prices themselves are in the same range? Those are questions that will probably have to wait until after the service is rolled out commercially this fall.

One thing that Microsoft is doing absolutely right for enterprise customers is specifying aggressive Service Level Agreements right up front: 99.95% connectivity guaranteed, two minute response time on instance outages, 99.9% processing success. It took long months for Amazon to get into that ballpark; Microsoft is aware of concerns and proactively addressing them before release.