Setting up Windows Azure Billing account

Yesterday me and my boss where setting up an Azure account and whilst the steps to setting up an account are pretty straightforward, we had some wishes that we had troubles figuring out.

What we wanted to do is use our MSDN Premium account benefits, which entitle you to use the Windows Azure platform for free for a curtain number of hours.

To use these benefits we had to sign-in with our MSDN-account via the MSDN subscription page.

When you sign in you will be directed to the Microsoft Online Services – Customer Portal, where will have to setup your credit card information.

This account will then become your Account Owner in the MOSCP (seeing as it has the creditcard information). If you don’t want your developers to have access to the billing information you can setup the Service Administrator account with a different live-id. The service Administrator is the account you use in the developer portal to manage you instances and services.

So what didn’t worked out as well a we would have liked.

First of we had to use our MSDN email account as an billing account (this account is a multiuse account by multiple devs not a very clean solution)

Second the Service Administrator account is the only account that can put stuff in the cloud, I would rather see that I could assign multiple administrators (Which is announced at PDC2010 and should be available later this year)

Hans