Azure Pricing Cleaned Up and Explained
Packaged software is pretty straightforward. You buy it for a set price, use it, and some time later either buy another or an upgrade. Even with volume licenses, as complex as they can be, you are still essentially just getting a discount with full rights to the package.
Boy, oh boy, is the cloud different. Here you buy access. Sometimes you are buying access to what used to be a packaged app and this is usually fairly simple. Other times you are buying or renting access to services or capacity.
That is the case with Windows Azure which can be offered as infrastructure or platform as a service. Here you can pay for what you agree to use, rather than the existing and still available pay-as-you-go.
If you agree to a certain amount of use, you can get one of three different discount levels, 20, 23, and 27 percent. The lowest discount is for monthly commitments of $500 to $14,999 (they couldn’t round up?) while the biggest price cut is for $40,000 and above.
Go beyond what you committed to and pay-as-you-go pricing kicks back in.
If you are confused, avail yourself of the Windows Azure Pricing Calculator available here.
Posted by Doug Barney on 10/11/2012 at 12:47 PM