Microsoft offers Azure virgins 'small' VM concession
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Microsoft is offering developers free access to the smallest possible compute cycles on its Azure cloud in an effort to tempt first timers.
The software giant on Tuesday said devs signing up to Windows Azure will get free access to 750 hours of extra small, virtual-machine-based compute instances running on Azure until June 30.
The revised offer extends Microsoft's earlier introductory offer from December 2010 of 25 small compute instances.
A compute instances is the size of virtual machine Microsoft runs on its Windows Azure servers and have been built to handle different apps based on complexity and workload.
Microsoft appears to be responding to the number-one complaint from developers that Windows Azure is too expensive. The biggest request of Windows Azure programmers has been that Microsoft make it less expensive to run very small services on Microsoft's cloud.
That's a problem for Microsoft, which is rolling out Azure as its alternative to Amazon's EC2, Google, Rackspace and others fluffing development and deployment of apps. Rather than focus on just .NET for once, the company is also trying to snare PHP and Java coders building new or extending existing apps.
Microsoft makes instances available in five flavors, starting at extra small - 1GHz of CPU, 768MB memory, 20GB of instance storage with low I/O performance - up to extra large - eight 1.6GHz CPUs, 14GB memory, 2,040GB instance of storage with a high I/O. Extra small is priced $0.05 per hour and extra large $0.96.
A small compute instance was clearly too much for those starting out and unsure of Azure or the cloud. You get a 1.6GHz processor, 1.75GB of memory, 225GB of instance storage, and moderate I/O performance for $0.12 an hour.
Today's updated offer and the offer in December come with 500MB of storage, 10,000 storage transactions, 100,000 access control transactions and two service bus connections.
Microsoft's revised offer to devs also throws in the same 25 hours of small compute offered last December. Tuesday's proposal makes no mention of the 500MB in and 500MB out of data transfers that was included in the December offer. ®
COMMENTS
Responding to AWS not developers
The 'micro' instances on Amazon can be had for as little as $0.01 (Linux) and $0.03 (Windows) on EC2. Even worse for Microsoft is that the EC2 instances are full machines so can do other stuff at the same time.
A small web site can be run comfortably on an old PIII or less so a modern CPU has many spare cycles and probably spend 99% or more of its time idling and presents an opportunity to do something useful - like run multiple small web sites.
As I understand it on Azure you pay they higher hourly rate for each application.
Article is incorrect
The Microsoft Website states that data transfer covers 500MB in / 500MB out
MS's Azure is a big FAIL for individual devs
The problem with Azure is not the hourly compute rates. It's the fact that you get charged per hour of uptime, not per hour of usage. This means for an always on application you end up paying a minimum of $35/month - which is rediculous for small apps. OK, you get built-in scaling, but the hobbyist developer this is targeting isn't interested in that in the first instance.
Better go with Google App Engine which is free up to a point.
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