Azure Prices Falling Again

I am abit slow in this but I wanted to post that the prices on Azure have dropped again. Microsoft is keeping the rates similar to what Amazon is charging for AWS.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/

I highlighted the areas below where the prices are dramatically different then before.  With this an extra small compute instance is now as low as $15 a month.  For databases, it is a flat fee of $5 a month for up to 100M in the database.  That s not a bad size.  If you compare it to the 1G for $10 it does seem abit high, but overall many databases will only need a few M of size.

Another big thing is that Microsoft is now making it simpler to do something for longer term.  They give you a discount if you sign up for blocks of 6 months at a time.  You can get 15% off, so a small compute instance would be $72 instead of $90 a month, but you have to do it in those blocks.  One bad thing here is that there is no discount on the extra small instance, it is $15 a month if you are doing month to month or in 6 month blocks.

Azure Compute Time

Virtual Machine Size	CPU Cores	Memory	Cost Per Hour
Extra Small	Shared	768 MB	$0.02
Small	1	1.75 GB	$0.12
Medium	2	3.5 GB	$0.24
Large	4	7 GB	$0.48
Extra Large	8	14 GB	$0.96

SQL Azure

Database Size	Price Per Database Per Month
0 to 100 MB	Flat $4.995
Greater than 100 MB to 1 GB	Flat $9.99
Greater than 1 GB to 10 GB	$9.99 for first GB, $3.996 for each additional GB
Greater than 10 GB to 50 GB	$45.954 for first 10 GB, $1.998 for each additional GB
Great than 50 GB to 150 GB	$125.874 for first 50 GB, $0.999 for each additional GB

Azure Storage

Standard pay-as-you-go pricing for storage
$0.125 per GB stored per month based on the daily average
$0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions

I definitely like the competition in price that all of the new cloud providers are giving us today.  I for one use Azure for my Thoughts and Prayers mobile app for the back end.  I use .NET for all of my coding and Azure has made it simple to use .NET in the cloud.  Of course Microsoft understand that not everyone wants to use .NET today so they also now are offering support for node.js, java, or php.