Thoughts about the Windows Azure pricing

Microsoft has recently unveiled its pricing for Windows Azure. In short, Microsoft did exactly align with the pricing offered by Amazon. CPU costs CPU costs 0.12/h,meaning that a single instance running 24/24 for a month costs 86.4 which is fairly expensive compared to classical hosting provider where you can get more for basically half the price.

But well, this situation was expected as Microsoft probably does not want to start a price war with his business partners still selling dedicated Windows Server hosting. Current Azure pricing is sufficiently high to deter most companies except the ones who happen to have peaky needs.

To me, the Azure pricing is fine except in 3 areas:

Obviously, those pricing weaknesses closely reflect missing cloud technologies for Azure (at the moment). The MapReduce issue will be fixed when Microsoft ports DryadLinq to Azure. Block storage and shared low cost web hosting might be also on their way too (although I have little info on that matter). As a side note, the Azure Cache Provider might be a killing tool to reduce the pressure on the cloud storage (but pricing is unknown yet).

As a final note, it’s interesting to see that the cloud computing pricing is really dependent on the quality of the software used to run the cloud. Better software typically leads to computing hardware being delivered at much lower costs, almost 10x lower costs in many situations.