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Microsoft experienced a cloud-centric week with Windows Azure, which is now generally available in 21 countries and no longer available for free. Microsoft hopes that the cloud-based platform and its application-building tools for developers will allow it to gain market share in the cloud computing arena, where it faces strong competition from the likes of Google and Amazon.
Keeping a close eye on Microsoft, we see that the cloud infrastructure and potential smartphone devices have dominated last week's headlines. eWeek reports:
Although Microsoft has traditionally earned the substantial bulk of its revenues from desktop-centric products such as its Windows operating system and Office, the company has also been constructing new cloud-based software as a way of creating a viable future. To that end, Microsoft announced on Feb. 1 that its Windows Azure platform, a competitor in the cloud computing space increasingly crowded by the likes of Amazon and Google, will be made generally available in 21 countries.
Azure consists of three components: Windows Azure, an operating system as a service; SQL Azure, a cloud-relational database; and Windows Azure Platform AppFabric, designed to provide security connectivity and federated access control for applications. The platform had been offered as a Community Technology Preview until Jan. 1, 2010, after which Microsoft announced a full switch-on of its services. The company started actually charging for Azure’s use on Feb. 2 at 12:00 a.m. GMT, a date and time designed to give developers in all 21 countries the chance at a full January of free service.
Customers have three payment options with Azure: a pay-as-you-go model, a subscription format and volume licensing. For all three types of service, users will pay 10 cents per gigabyte for incoming data, and 15 cents for outgoing data, while the “consumption” model will charge 12 cents per hour of infrastructure usage. Storage will cost 15 cents per gigabyte. The business edition of the SQL Azure database will cost a flat $99.99.
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