Of course the only sensible answer would be, it depends 😉 But that would be a really silly post. Last week I did a presentation for my colleges titled “Windows Azure – An introduction”. I expected a lot questions beforehand but I didn’t expect a majority of the questions pertaining to how much it would cost.
Perhaps I should not have put so much emphasis on “pay for what you use” instead of the fixed payment schema you have with traditional of site-hosting. And seeing that I’m giving my presentation a second time around I want to be better prepared.
Back to the horse’s mouth:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/
Lot’s and lot’s of pennies, frankly I really cannot make head or tails out of it. I did, however discovered that Microsoft also offers so called “Commitment Offers”. These offerings give you a discount on your monthly bill in return for six month commitment on your side.
If you want to make a realist estimate you will be needing excel and lots of knowledge of your applications, that your going to put in the cloud. Lot of information you will of course already know (size, storage, bandwidth consumption) but with ‘Pay for what you use’ there might be some items on your bill that your weren’t aware of. With Windows Azure you will be paying for transactions as well as storage. Knowing how your applications behave will become very important, to many transactions will cost you a lot of pennies you could have kept in your pocket!
For those out there that just want to get a ball park figure Microsoft is offering a tool which gives you an indication on what Windows Azure would cost. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/tco/
Azure in my cloud 