Microsoft’s cloud platform Windows Azure coming in November
Microsoft has been doling out dribs and drabs of news about Windows Azure, its cloud computing platform, since it announced Azure back in October. What originally started out as a lot of generalities has become more and more concrete, and now Microsoft has gotten very specific indeed, revealing Azure’s launch date and pricing.
The company says it will officially release Azure at its Professional Developers Conference from November 17 to 19 in Los Angeles. (Azure was first announced at last year’s PDC.) As for pricing, Azure will cost 12 cents per hour of computing, 15 cents of gigabytes for storage, and 10 cents per gigabyte in/15 cents per gigabyte out for bandwidth. That’s in the same neighborhood as its big-name competitors, Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine, though it’s a bit more expensive on the computing front (Amazon and Google both start at 10 cents per hour). Microsoft also plans to offer a 15 to 30 percent “development accelerator” discount, in exchange for a six-month commitment.
During the presentations I’ve attended and conversations I’ve had with Microsoft about Azure, one of the big emphases has been on Microsoft’s reputation with bigger companies, who might hesitate before moving their data or applications onto, say, Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Microsoft also likes to talk about the fact that Azure will fit into the company’s larger ecosystem of developer tools and services. I guess we’ll see in November if that helps Microsoft chip away at Amazon’s built-in lead.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.