Windows Azure: how much does it cost a month for a light duty programmer? Roughly?

Question

I have a question about how much does Windows Azure cost, roughly, for a light duty programmer.  I am not looking for a sales quote, and I don't expect anybody, including Microsoft employees or affiliates, to bind Microsoft to any firm offer.  I'm just hesitant to start using Azure after the free trial period ends (see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/free-trial/ ) because of potential runaway costs.

By light duty I mean somebody who wants to code a light "Hello World" type program and test it, or a lightweight business application, or a moderately sized (couple of months of programming) single person project.  Putting in 6 to 8 hour days (that's light you'll have to agree). Sorry if that's vague but I don't know how else to phrase it. 

I don't mind paying up to about $20 a month for Azure.  But here is my concern:  I start a project under the free trial period, then, when the free trial period expires, the bill for the next month will be $500.  This is why I am hesitating signing up to the free trial.  Details on Azure billing below.

I think I know the answer--that the bill will probably be around the cost of an ISP--so less than $30 a month--but I need somebody here to validate that hypothesis.

What might help is if you can share your billing costs with Azure and the time you put into programming, and/or lines of code, or any other metric.  That way it will give me some level of comfort.

Thanks,

Paul

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/free-trial/

 

You can run an Extra Small Windows Azure instance free through September 30th, 2011 using the Windows Azure platform free trial. You also get a free 1GB SQL Azure database for the first 90 days of your trial.

Monthly Allocations
Compute: 750 hours of an Extra Small Compute Instance and 25 hours of a Small Compute Instance
Storage: 20GB with 50k Storage transactions
Data Transfers: 20GB in / 20GB out
Relational Database: 1G Web Edition SQL Azure database (for 90 days only)
AppFabric Caching**: 128MB cache
** The Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service is provided at no charge for billing periods prior to August 1, 2011. Beginning on August 1, a single 128MB cache is included at no charge. All other cache utilized will be charged at the standard rates.

 

Answer 1

Hi Paul,

Let me try and answer your question. Basically in Windows Azure you will pay for items on a number of different factors:

1. Items commissioned for you: Example of this include any VMs commissioned for your applications. You will pay irrespective of whether anybody is using your applications or not. So let's say if you host a website in just 1 Extra Small VM for one month, you will pay $0.05 (Cost / Hour) * 720 (Hours in a month) = $36.00. If you deploy your application in 2 VMs (or "you have 2 instances of your role" as they say in Windows Azure lingo), you'll pay $72.00.

2. Transaction costs: If your application is making use of Windows Azure Storage, anytime you do a successful operation on the objects in Windows Azure storage, you're charged a transaction fees. Currently I believe you pay about $0.10 for 10,000 storage transaction but please check the pricing page for most current information.

3. Storage costs: If you are storing some data in Windows Azure Storage, you are charged a fee based on how much data you're storing in Windows Azure Storage.

4. Bandwidth costs: Any bandwdith consumption is again chargeable.

IMHO Windows Azure (especially the compute portion of it) is not suitable for low traffic website where there is no obvious need for dynamic scaling. Windows Azure does it's magic when you really need to scale out your application (horizontally or vertically) without worrying about infrastructure.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Gaurav Mantri

Cerebrata Software

http://www.cerebrata.com

 

Answer 2

If you are developing a side project you can spend as little money as you like. You can use the development environment for most of your development, only deploying for as long as you need to test your app in a live environment. If you are really trying to minimize your hourly expenditure you should be aware that the billing hour is on the hour - e.g. 10:00-11:00 - so you should deploy early in the hour and delete late in the hour. For small apps, storage and bandwidth should be relatively inexpensive so you could probably use the cloud for storage avoiding the edge-case differences of development storage.

Another thing to be careful about is the distinction between extra-small and small instances. Some of the offers are for one and some are for the other. I believe small instance hours can be used for a smaller amount of time of larger instances - it is total core time that counts - but extra-small instance hours can not be used in this way.

Answer 3

Could you be so kind to clear up one more fact regarding free trial. It is written there that one Extra Small instance will be free of charge, but if you start deploying your application into portal you will get warning that you need to run 2 instances instead of one, because of upgrade domain and smth. like that. That is why I can come to the conclusion that I need to calculate 2 instances in my billing account and trial is not really free of charge. Do I miss something?

Thank you,

Vitaliy Korney

Answer 4

--  if you start deploying your application into portal you will get warning that you need to run 2 instances instead of one, because of upgrade domain and smth. like that.

This is a routine warning advising you that the SLA does not apply if you have less than two instances. This really only impacts production services. If you are doing a develop/deploy cycle then you probably only want one instance running.

Answer 5

Thanks Gaurav Mantri, I'll mark your answer as the Answer.  I did more research and found the below.  The cost is a bit higher than I expected, roughly USD $50 a month, not $20, unless you sign up for a 'limited time offer', which expires.  Still it's a start I guess.

 

Online calculator for Azure costs:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/?_oskwdid=9394865&_engineadid=11946385665

Picking the minimum in each category, and adding 'secure messaging' as an extra feature for $1.99/month extra, here is what I found the minimum price to be.

All units in USD or months:

Compute Instance (750 hours): $37.50
Relational Database (up to 1GB): $9.99
Storage and Transactions (up to 20 GB): $3.00
Data Transfer (10 GB in/out): $2.00
Access Control and Service Bus (secure messaging, up to 100k transactions): $1.99

Regular price: $54.48 a month

An introductory special is running with many of these features for a limited time for $4.83 a month.

All in all, it would be nice if Microsoft gave developers a free sandbox to play with, just to get their feet wet, but I have a feeling that due to the hype behind Azure there's probably a lot of demand so they can set prices high (just a guess)?

 

Answer 6

You can get limited benefits for "free" for 30 days without a credit via the Azure pass program. Plus, the development tools give you the opportunity to learn much of the platform's API without the need for any hosted services.

Answer 7

Yeah I have just discovered the Azure Service Charges the hard way.  

I took up the MSDN Premium offer to have a play with Azure Services, and understand the technology as I assumed that I would be using utilising much much much less than the Free  100 Hours Compute Time Allocaiton.  Afterall I would only be developing simple  Hello World Services, with tiny cpu loads, hardly enterprose splitting stuff.  I had a dabble about three weeks back, getting my first wcf and Blob services up on Azure.  All looking quite intersting from a technology point of view.

Just got my first Azure Bill from Microsoft for £40.00  !!  -  It looks like they are charging me for 461 Excess Compute Hours above 100 Free Hours !    Duhhhh   - Microsoft Compute Hours should be read as  HOSTING Hours, not cpu cycles.

So Feel like I have been scammed by Microsoft, for not making this clear to us MSDN subscribers just trying to get into Azure technologies.   This has left a very bad taste in my mouth regarding Micorsoft, Their cloud services and Azure in general.  I am now deleting removing all my Azure Services, and instrucing my Credit Crad not to make any furher payment tpo Microsoft.

Call me naive for not understadning what Micorsoft  'Compute Hours' really means, but I am going back to my Free PHP script/ MySQL Host provider, and never returning to MS Azure ! 

So Long MS you have really pi**ed off one Developer here.  

Answer 8

I'm sorry you got bit. The first thing I tell anyone when looking into Azure is to make sure you understand the billing model. Assumptions about it can quickly cost you big money.

Additionally, it would have been nice if make the pricing info a bit more closely linked to the MSDN subscription benefits page. If you click on the "Measuring Consumption" line the first bullet item talks about this. Personally, I like the idea of calling is "service hours" or "service hosting hours".

Answer 9

The most annoying thing is that I really liked the .NET stack, and Azure was looking to be such good technology.  I have tried to evangalise upon .NET and Microsoft technologies, with my MSDN subscription.  So it is most dissapointing that MS are making such a cost imposition on developers trying to make an entry into this technology, which I still struggle the real justification of. 

An opportunity rather messed up.   Oh Well.

Answer 10

Well I've been using my Azure MSDN benefits for over a year now. To date I've only had to pay for $0.40 in charges, all related to AppFabric service bus usage.

So it can be done if you manage your resources usage closely.

Answer 11

Brent,

 

How did you keep your costs so low?

Answer 12

FIrst off, I don't use MSDN for hosting anything production facing. Its a fine line in the terms of use, so I err on the side of caution. Furthermore, I remove any running instances at the end of each day. For the service bus, the trick is to make sure when you create a service bus namespace, associate it with your MSDN 5 connection pack. In my experience, setting it up against a single or per connection charge results in fully billable connections.

Answer 13

Sounds like if you are a single developer starting out, this wouldn't be the "way to go" considering the amount of money you are expected to pay which is unknown. I personally do not like surprises.

If the company really stands for the service it provides, in this case windows azure, then they will offer a competitive standard monthly price. You can invest $220.00 or about $20.00/month at discountasp.net for a website and a relational database. In this case MS is not being competitive or extremely vague about light weight applications and pricing.

My opinion, pricing is to vague and not worth the risk.

Answer 14

Sounds like if you are a single developer starting out, this wouldn't be the "way to go" considering the amount of money you are expected to pay which is unknown. I personally do not like surprises.

If the company really stands for the service it provides, in this case windows azure, then they will offer a competitive standard monthly price. You can invest $220.00 or about $20.00/month at discountasp.net for a website and a relational database. In this case MS is not being competitive or extremely vague about light weight applications and pricing.

My opinion, pricing is to vague and not worth the risk.

I have debated this over and over myself. A lot of developers (including myself about a month or two ago) don't realize that there is a local version of Azure storage and compute emulator available as part of Azure SDK that you can use to play with and learn. It is not exactly identical to the cloud version but is a good start.

As for Azure pricing, yes, the unknown monthly cost without the option of a fixed ceiling that one could set is big factor preventing many developers from jumping on board. It is a matter of your needs - Azure costs more that even some self-managed dedicated hosting providers (here's an example that I found during my search - http://www.reliablesite.net/v4/dedicated-server-detail.aspx?server=intel-xeon-e3-1230, I am in no way affiliated with this company but what you would get for under $200 per month with quad-core Xeon processor, 8Gigs of RAM and 1TB RAID 10 here would cost you a lot more on Azure).

But unless you go fully-managed dedicated hosting, you have to do lot of stuff like making backups and monitoring the server yourself. On the other hand, Azure provides many benefits of managed hosting and triple replication in the same data center which is good for reliability and it has good scalability options. But SQL Azure is very expensive (50GB database for $499 per month, seriously?? What if you are high data volume but low/medium transaction volume site? There is no way I can be profitable with such high platform costs).

After looking at SQL Azure costs, I have decided not to use it as my main storage. But then to use Azure Table and Blob storage, I had to throw away my database design and start from scratch due to PartitionKey/RowKey being the only index limitation and I have still not made it far enough in my design.

Also, there is no full-text search option on Azure (Table storage or SQL Azure) unless you want to mess around with Lucene which I have and still not found it to be optimal.

And there is no good backup solution on Azure storage (you can geo-replicate but I haven't found good documentation on how to do this yet) and none of these provide regular snapshots of your data that you could just restore from in case of a need to go back in time. You could kind of extract the data from Azure storage and store it somewhere but it is not straightforward especially if your partition keys are not sequential and your data volume is high.

I am still willing to give Azure a chance fully knowing that I might have to go back to the dedicated hosting solution mentioned above if the Azure storage doesn't provide me with the low latency that I need along with high volume of data (Again, SQL Azure is out of the question because it is limited to 50GB and I can't afford $499 per month for it and I don't want to deal with SQL Azure Federations which are not even released yet).

BOTTOM LINE: If you want to run a small website or two with a small database, go for a shared hosting solution. It is a no brainer. If you want to design a scalable solution, consider Azure platform (I fall in this category but it might backfire on me). If you need to utilize compute resources (pay-as-you-go processing power), consider Azure platform.

(pardon my grammar and typos as I am multi-tasking but wanted to throw my experience w/Azure out for others to read)

Answer 15

Just saw this:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/features/storage/

New features (09/16/2011)

• Windows Azure Geo-replication replicates Windows Azure Blobs and Tables between two data centers 100s of miles apart from each other on the same continent, at no additional cost, to provide additional data durability in the case of a major disaster.

Answer 16

FIrst off, I don't use MSDN for hosting anything production facing. Its a fine line in the terms of use, so I err on the side of caution. Furthermore, I remove any running instances at the end of each day. For the service bus, the trick is to make sure when you create a service bus namespace, associate it with your MSDN 5 connection pack. In my experience, setting it up against a single or per connection charge results in fully billable connections.

LOL, i need to put my website to bed at night????, :)) Coz Micro... charges me for every breath... every insect that flies over my website?? LMHO..

Answer 17

JackyIO, you pay for what you use. If I'm not using it, I shut it down and remove it. Its my choice and based on a desire to reduce costs. If you don't want to do it, and you're ok with paying for resources to host an app nobody is using, then you're free to leave it up and running.

Cloud is a pay as you go consumption model (mostly). So the way we think about costs needs to change when we're looking at leveraing it.

Answer 18

So far with my experince of VMs on Azure, my advice would be to use AWS.

Cheaper, free is free and it just works.