How Windows Azure helps businesses take advantage of the speed, scale, and economic benefits of the cloud

Editorial Staff Note: This article is written by Scott Woodgate and Karri Alexion-tiernan of the Windows Azure Product Marketing Department

Over the last few months, you may have heard us talking about "the Power of convergence", and we shared the internal deployment of Windows Server and how Windows Azure in the cloud helped businesses take advantage of the speed, scale, and economic benefits of the cloud. Now we're going to expand this by making a lot of new investments for developers and IT professionals.

For our developers, we know that development and test scenarios are often the first stage of an organization's entry into the cloud. So today, we're very happy to tell you that with MSDN subscriptions, developing on Windows Azure will be simpler and quicker. From today, the new Windows Azure MSDN offers up to 150 dollars a month to develop and test any Azure service you choose. You can choose from a number of Microsoft preconfigured virtual machines (available in the Windows Azure virtual Machine Mirroring Library) and a mirror from the open source community, or you can upload the software included in the MSDN subscription to your own virtual machine (except for Windows clients). Even better, when you run the MSDN software with a Windows Azure virtual machine, there is no other cost. You can click here to find out more about MSDN benefits. Speaking of Speed, the Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, Visual Studio Premium with MSDN, and Visual St with Windows Azure MSDN are activated and used before September 30, 2013 Udio Ultimate with MSDN subscribers, you can also participate in the lottery and have the opportunity to win the Aston Martin V8 Vantage sports car!

While this is good news for developers, we know that economic benefits are always the top priority in the IT industry. Both for big companies and small companies, costs are very important. We mentioned earlier that we wanted to reduce the price of virtual machines, so corporate customers can get first-class performance without paying high prices. Today, we share another economic advantage, that is, we will change the way we charge virtual machines.

From today, we'll charge customers in minutes, not hours, without minimum requirements-which means no rounding, you'll just have to pay for the amount of time you spend. If you stop the VM, you do not need to pay the calculation. If you use a different cloud provider, you'll find that even if it takes only 5 minutes, it will charge you by the hour, or force you to use the minimum number of minutes, but this may still be higher than your actual time.

For example, if you use a dual-core Linux virtual machine with just over 3GB of memory on Windows Azure for 65 minutes (that is, 1 hours and 5 minutes), the total charge is 0.13 USD per minute. If you use a similar configuration of another cloud service provider, the price is higher, because even if the first two hours is only 5 minutes, it will be charged for two hours. The cost of the same service can be as high as $0.32, depending on the location of the other provider, or 0.19 dollars for a single virtual machine. Although the cost difference for a virtual machine looks small, the difference will not be underestimated if you multiply this number by the thousands of virtual machines that you might eventually run. You'll suddenly find that your cloud is not as profitable as you thought it would be. We want to eliminate price barriers to ensure that customers can take advantage of all cloud advantages.

Although we will change the billing method, but will not reduce the quality of service provided. When using Windows Azure, you will continue to receive high-availability services and the monthly SLAs will remain unchanged. Customer-dependent cloud platforms such as Jackson Hewitt will also provide the same scale, support and reliability as ever. Jackson Hewitt, the 2nd-ranked U.S. tax consultancy, uses the Windows Azure infrastructure service that runs SQL Server 2012 to meet the computing needs of the surge in the tax-reporting peak season. Recently, their chief application architect told us, "It's absolutely imperative to be able to scale as needed while maintaining high availability." But they believe that Windows Azure can do the job perfectly, especially in the busiest peak tax season.

One of the key steps we are trying to provide our customers with the best mixed cloud experience is to ensure that internal deployment resources are seamlessly connected to Windows Azure. In addition, we are also very pleased to tell you that, in addition to the supported Cisco and Juniper devices, the point-to-point network also supports F5, Citrix, and WatchGuard VPN devices to meet the various hardware configuration requirements of enterprise customers.

Last but not least, we will also announce a trial version of BizTalk services and take the lead in the public cloud services market. BizTalk Services is a cloud-based, Business-to-business integration Platform service that provides easy connectivity to local LOB applications and is available only on Windows Azure. With BizTalk services, developers and IT
Professionals will be able to further expand the "Convergence power" by building, managing, and accessing powerful hybrid applications, leveraging extensive enterprise data and systems on a variety of devices. BizTalk services provide complete EDI processing, cloud application integration, and a mixed connection to local LOB applications. Click here for more information, click here to register for a trial service.

All of our new investments, including the new global data centers in China, Australia and Japan, will continue to help developers and IT professionals take advantage of the many advantages Windows Azure offers, while helping customers achieve global scale. We will start the 2013 TechEd season in New Orleans. If you are passing through the azure booth, you are welcome to visit and consult and participate in Windows Azure Challenge to win prizes, or try Windows Azure immediately. Look forward to your participation!