Azure Pricing in plain English

July 17th, 2009 | No Comments |  Share  | Azure Pricing in plain English

Messages = $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
Storage Transactions = $0.01 / 10K

Cloud Computing price list from major vendors like Microsoft, Amazon , Google etc looks like the above statements. Seemingly simple but it is impossible to decipher what the “Total Cost of Ownership” is. In an era where every investment $ is monitored, making a transition to something as significant as Cloud Computing needs sound financial justifications.

To aid in this process, Cumulux is authoring a 3 part series aimed at demystifying the pricing model of the cloud and to bring it in the context of typical application scenarios. It is positioned at decision makers to enable them make educated decisions about the Total Cost of Ownership of running applications on the Azure Services Platform.

In this first part , we look at a compute heavy Financial Services application running on Windows Azure. We reached a Total Operating Cost of $1,637 per month for running about 50 parallel simulations for a month ( 22 market days) each of which takes about 10 hours to run. This is a heavy duty application and the TCO numbers are stunningly low. We will soon post a comparison of what this would cost in a private datacenter or in a hosted environment like Rackspace. The magic here lies in the fact that Azure allows flexible scalability of resources without having to plan & provision for peak capacity.