Microsoft plans to provide cloud computing services to customers as simply as possible

While Microsoft has not yet made clear how to incorporate Windows Azure pricing into corporate customers who have signed a long-term contract with the company, Microsoft executives say Microsoft intends to make it easier for these customers to take advantage of Microsoft's new cloud computing services as soon as this week.

At Microsoft's Global partners conference last week, Microsoft said Azure would be officially commercially available in November and would set a price policy for cloud-based applications and development platforms. Microsoft also said that Azure would be a part of Microsoft's package and would be offered to big customers through volume licensing contracts. However, Microsoft did not specify whether the contracts included a pay-as-you-go model and several CPUs per license support.

Despite Microsoft's good intentions, Microsoft has unwittingly created some complexity. This makes things a little more complicated by trying to get more web-oriented products into the traditional business of setting new pricing patterns.

In particular, the pricing of the commercial product online Suite (BPOS) includes a variety of versions of Exchange, SharePoint, livemeeting, and Office communications software, which gives customers a bit of concern about their complexity. If a user buys a bpos kit and wants to provide related services to his customer, the user must also purchase a Client Access License (CAL). The prerequisite for not buying a client license is that these customers do not have access to the appropriate software. Once the enterprise user and Microsoft have signed the enterprise agreement required by the Software Assurance (SA) Maintenance program, Microsoft will provide the user with a special license. But enterprise users can still not pay for the part of the software they are not using.

Some analysts point out that with the addition of Azure, Microsoft's original Pay-as-you-go pricing model is in trouble. In this respect, the personage said the industry also needs to observe, until Microsoft introduced into the Azure after the specific pricing contract. To reduce complexity, Doug Hauger said that Microsoft would provide users with a way to obtain Azure licenses based on user requests, priced separately from software they had already paid for.

In addition, to ensure that users pay only for the part they use, Microsoft will provide users with a tool called the "Development Accelerator", which allows people to pay a one-time fee of 6 months at a fixed price within a predictable price range, and access to Windows Azure during the period. According to previous Microsoft news, Azure according to the use of the standard fee is calculated hourly rate of 12 cents per gigabyte, storage capacity of 15 cents per GB, 10,000 storage processing charges 10 cents. For network bandwidth, charge 10 to 15 cents per GB.

The discount program code-named "Development Accelerator" has two forms, offering a discount of 15% to 30 cheaper than an android charge. This requires the signing of a 6-month contract for the use of the excess in accordance with the normal standard billing. After 6 months, price recovery standard Azure charges. Microsoft has also announced charges for its SQL Azure database. The basic network version is 9.99 dollars, including the 1GB relational database. The Enterprise Edition is 99.99 dollars, including a 10GB database.

According to a report in early May, a clue shows that Microsoft's thinking is undergoing structural changes, and the company has incorporated its data storage and Web services business unit under a single business platform under the group. At first glance, Web services and data storage are a confusing mix, but there are still some reasons why Microsoft is doing this, most likely because Microsoft is considering a new strategy: cloud storage services.

July 14 Evening News, according to foreign media reports, Microsoft today released the cloud computing platform Azure charging mode, and said the product will be listed in mid-November.

The company said Azure would charge for the actual usage and would sell it on a discounted basis in order to attract corporate customers. The Azure platform's computing resources are priced at $0.12 per hour, and storage resources are priced at $0.15 a month per gigabyte and $0.10 per 10,000 storage transactions. SQL Azure will provide a basic monthly package of 9.99 dollars, with a database capacity of up to 1GB, and a 99.99 Dollar commercial edition with a maximum database capacity of up to 10GB.

Microsoft also offers a discount package called the Development Accelerator (development Accelerator), which is divided into two categories, offering discounts of 15% and 30% respectively. To enjoy a discount, the user must ensure that at least 6 months are used, the amount of excess usage is charged at the normal standard, and all resources will return to normal standard after 6 months.

Microsoft also announced that Azure will be officially available at Microsoft's "Professional developer Conference" in mid-November this year. Microsoft released Azure as early as last October, and developers have been testing the platform through the Microsoft Community Technology Preview (Community Marvell Preview).

Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, which has previously sparked a strong response in the industry, will also include a web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure, along with Microsoft's. NET services are connected and compatible with each other.

Microsoft said that Azure's computing and connectivity reliability would reach 99.95%, while storage resources could be as reliable as 99.99%.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief Software architect, has said that Microsoft has a dual advantage in the two areas of platform and application, and has a wealth of experience in the consumer and corporate markets, while Azure will set up a Rey Oze for Microsoft in the area of cloud computing.