More on Windows Azure Commercial Availability

     Microsoft announced on 14th July the commercial availability of Windows Azure as I posted previously and now there are more information’s about the the same subject so I decided to write again on the subject. 

    Important elements to retain:

“During Community Technology Preview (CTP), services included in Windows Azure will be available without charge - subject to certain limits:

  • Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours
  • Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
  • Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day“

How Consumption is Measured:

    • How Consumption is Measured?
      • Windows Azure
        • SLA
          • “(…)we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time (…)”
        • Compute time, measured in machine hours
        • Storage, measured in GB
        • Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure datacenter), measured in GB
        • Transactions
      • SQL Data Services
        • SLA
          • “(…) will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. “Monthly Availability Percentage” for a specific customer database is the ratio of the time the database was available to customer to the total time in a month. Time is measured in 5-minute intervals in a 30-day monthly cycle. (…)”
        • Web Edition Relational Database includes:
          • Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
          • Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
          • Auto Scale with pay-as-you grow
          • Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.
        • Business Edition DB includes:
          • Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
          • Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
          • Auto Scale, Pay-as- you grow
          • Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
          • Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps
      • NET Services
        • “(…)Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for .NET Services are equivalent to those specified above in the Windows Azure SLA. Due to inherent differences between the technologies, underlying SLA definitions and terms differ for .NET Services. Using the Service Bus module of .NET Services, customers will have connectivity between a customer’s service endpoint and our Internet gateway(…)”
        • Messages are charged to the customer in discrete blocks of 100,000 (“100k”) for each monthly billing period, meaning that
        • A customer who consumed 95,000 messages would be billed for 1x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
        • A customer who uses 150,000 messages in a billing period would be charged for 2x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
        • A customer who uses 20 million messages in a billing period would be charged

More information can be be found on the Windows Azure site.

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