Not so long ago Microsoft said it would reconsider pricing structure of its Windows Azure services to align it with that of Amazon’s cloud services. Amazon reduced prices only recently in the last week. Microsoft followed suit and has announced price reductions for Windows Azure services.
According to their announcement, the prices on compute will be reduced by about 35%. Storage prices on Windows Azure prices could see a drop of up to 65%. Looks like Microsoft has seen the writing on the clouds and has climbed down a bit to accommodate customers in a price sensitive market in the hope of attracting more users.
At the same time Microsoft has also announced the launch of a new Basic instance to be active from 3rd April. This is a new tier of general purpose instances with machine configurations similar to the standard tier services. The instances range from extra small, categorized as A0 to extra large, categorized as A4. On a positive note the new Basic services are priced affordably at 27% less than the prevailing prices of standard models. However the new Basic does not include auto scaling or load balancing. For users in the production environment where these two parameters are not quite decisive, it does not matter at all. The Basic offering from Microsoft has a configuration similar to Amazon’s AWS instances to match their prices with the Standard model continuing to offer advanced features at a price. If you are interested you can get pricing details from Microsoft website link here
