Designing Data Storage Architecture - Pricing Overview

https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/

Learn more about Windows Azure pricing and billing meters.

Compute time, measured in service hours:

Price

Windows Azure compute hours are charged only when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Partial compute hours are billed as full hours. More about Compute

The table below summarizes the Pay-As-You-Go price and the resources provided for each instance size.

Virtual Machine Size	CPU Cores	Memory	Cost Per Hour
Extra Small	Shared	768 MB	$0.04
Small	1	1.75 GB	$0.12
Medium	2	3.5 GB	$0.24
Large	4	7 GB	$0.48
Extra Large	8	14 GB	$0.96

Details on the Virtual machine sizes can be found here

Billing Details

Billing meter for Windows Azure Compute is Compute Hour, and it is charged only when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, you should remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing.

All compute hours are converted into small instance hours when presented on your bill. For example, one clock hour of a medium compute instance would be presented as two small compute instance hours at the small instance rate of $0.12 per hour on your bill. This table describes how each of the compute instance sizes is converted to the number of small compute instance hours:

Compute Instance Size	Clock Hours	Small Instance Hours
Extra Small	1 hour	1/3 hour
Small	1 hour	1 hour
Medium	1 hour	2 hours
Large	1 hour	4 hours
Extra Large	1 hour	8 hours

Compute hours are billed based on the number of clock hours your service was deployed multiplied by the number of equivalent small compute instances included in your deployment. Partial compute instance hours (prior to conversion) are billed as full compute hours for each clock hour an instance is deployed. For example, if you deploy a small compute instance at 10:50 AM and delete the deployment at 11:10 AM, you will be billed fortwo small compute hours, one hour for usage during 10:50 AM to 11:00 AM and another hour for usage during 11:00 AM to 11:10 AM.

For other compute instance sizes you deploy, your hours will be converted into the equivalent small instance hours by multiplying by 1/3, 2, 4 or 8, depending on the compute instance size deployed. In addition, each time you delete your deployment and redeploy your service, you will be billed a minimum of one clock hour for each compute instance deployed. However, any instances deployed for less than five minutes within one clock hour will not be charged.

Learn more about compute.

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Database, based on size of the database:

Price

SQL Azure Database is billed based on the size of the database, and it is available in two editions: Web and Business. The Web Edition and Business Edition SQL Azure databases provide up to 5 GB and 150 GB of a T-SQL based relational database, respectively.

Database	Standard pay-as-you-go pricing
Web Edition (up to 5 GB)	$9.99 per 1 GB of database per month
Business Edition (up to 150 GB)	$99.99 per 10 GB of database per month (Maximum charge of $499.95 per database)*

*This maximum amount is calculated based on the accumulated charges for each database you deploy over the entire billing month.

Billing Details

We charge a monthly fee for each SQL Azure database, but we amortize that database fee over the month and calculate your fee on a daily basis. This daily fee is dependent on the database type (e.g., 1 GB Web Edition, 10 GB Business Edition, etc.), peak database size rolled up to the next billing increment, and number of databases you use. For example, if you utilized three 10 GB Business Edition databases for 1 day during a billing month, your daily usage for that day would show a little less than 0.1 10 GB Business Edition database (3 databases / 31 days).

All usage for each Web Edition database is converted into the 1 GB size and all usage for each Business Edition database is converted into the 10 GB size, rounded up to the next discrete billing increment. For example, if the peak size of your Business Edition database was 45 GB for a particular day, your usage for determining your charges would be considered 50 GB for that database for that day.

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Virtual Machines:

Price

The pricing model for the Virtual Machine role is the same as that for the compute roles above. Customers are charged at an hourly rate depending on the compute instance size. The Windows Azure fee for running the VM role - whether consumption or commitment based - includes Windows Server licensing costs.

More about Virtual Machines

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Storage, measured in GB:

Price

Storage is billed in units of the average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. For example, if you consistently utilized 10 GB of storage for the first half of the month and none for the second half of the month, you would be billed for your average usage of 5 GB of storage.

For Windows Azure Drive storage, you will be billed only for the storage space used by the page blob and the read/write transactions to the page blob. You will not be charged for read transactions that utilize the local drive cache. Windows Azure Drive usage is billed at the same rates as standard Windows Azure Storage and is included in these totals on your bill. There will not be a separate line item for Windows Azure Drive on your bill. Windows Azure Drive storage is currently in its beta release and a service level agreement is offered for this service.

Standard pay-as-you-go pricing for storage
$0.14 per GB stored per month based on the daily average
$0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions

More about Storage

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Data transfers measured in GB (transmissions to and from the Windows Azure datacenter): All inbound data transfers are at no charge.

Price

All inbound data transfers, i.e. data going into the Window Azure platform datacenters, are free. Price for outbound data transfers, i.e. data going out of the Windows Azure platform datacenters, is shown below.

Pricing details for outbound data transfers
North America and Europe regions: $0.12
Asia Pacific Region: $0.19

Billing Details

Data transfers are charged based on the total amount of data moving in and out of the Windows Azure platform datacenters via the internet in a given billing period. Data transfers between Windows Azure services located within the same sub-region are not subject to charge. Data transfers between sub-regions are charged at normal rates on both sides of the transfer. A sub-region is the lowest level geo-location that you may select to deploy your applications and associated data. Below is a list of our regions and sub-regions for normal data transfer (except for CDN).

Regions	Sub Regions
Zone 1	North Europe
	Western Europe
	North Central US
Zone 2	South Central US
	East Asia
	Southeast Asia

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Content Delivery Network:

Price

CDN charges are incurred for the data requests the CDN receives and for the data it transfers out to satisfy these requests.

Standard pay-as-you-go monthly pricing for the CDN
$0.12per GB for data transfers from European and North American locations
$0.19 per GB for data transfers from other locations
$0.01 per 10,000 transactions

Billing Details

CDN charges shown above do not include charges associated with transferring this data from Windows Azure Storage to CDN. Any data transfers and storage transactions incurred to get data from Windows Azure Storage to the CDN will be charged separately at our normal Data Transfer and Storage transaction rates.

Windows Azure CDN data transfer charges are based on the data center location from where the traffic was served, not the end user's location. Below is a table that maps the data center locations to the appropriate zone for which they belong for billing purposes.

Billing Regions	Geographic Location
Zone 1	North America
	Europe
Zone 2	Asia Pacific
	Latin America
	Middle East / Africa

Developers cannot control which locations are used to deliver content, so bills may reflect delivery charges from any of the Windows Azure CDN billing regions. User requests are directed to CDN nodes based on their Internet service provider's routing tables as well as network conditions. Users may be routed to locations that are preferred by their ISP, and/or nodes that are judged as "closer" in a logical sense, not necessarily physical proximity. For example, if a developer deploys content on the CDN and end users are in both Europe and Asia Pacific, the developer would likely see charges for delivery in both Zone 1 and Zone 2. However, some users may be served from one of our other geographic locations such as North America, based on routing tables and network status, if for example an Asia Pacific CDN node became unreachable. In this example, the developer would be charged for data transfers at Zone 1 rates for those users.

When the Windows Azure CDN receives a request for an object it does not have at an edge location, it will make a standard request of Windows Azure Storage to obtain the data. CDN charges do not include fees associated with transferring this data from Windows Azure Storage to CDN. Any data transfers and storage transactions incurred to get data from Windows Azure Storage to CDN will be charged separately at our normal Windows Azure Storage rates. CDN charges are incurred for data requests it receives and for the data it transfers out to satisfy these requests.

Availability of content in the Windows Azure CDN's local caches (often called "cache efficacy" or "offload") is nondeterministic but is influenced by multiple factors including:

• Expiration ("max-age") header values
• Overall total size of the developer's content library (how much could be cached)
• Active working set (how much is currently cached)
• Traffic (how much is being served)
• Cache churn (how often are objects being added to cache, or aging out)

For example, a developer with a large ("wide") library with high churn and high traffic will have less cache efficacy than other users, because cache turnover is higher, so objects will be swapped in and out more frequently. This developer's overall Windows Azure Storage data transfer charges will be proportionally higher, since more origin requests are required. The overall end-user experience in this example will also be slightly slower on average since fewer requests are served from cache. The main cost control for developers to affect cache efficacy is the "max-age" HTTP header. Longer max-age headers allow the CDN to hold objects longer, reducing the need to make origin requests.

More about CDN

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Caching, based on cache size per month:

Price

Caching is priced per cache size per month, no matter how much cache you actually end up using. In addition to the prices noted above for Caching, you will also be charged for the associated data transfers, for ingress and egress outside the data center that your app is provisioned.

Standard pay-as-you-go pricing for caching
128 MB cache for $45.00
256 MB cache for $55.00
512 MB cache for $75.00
1 GB cache for $110.00
2 GB cache for $180.00
4 GB cache for $325.00

Billing Details

Once you provision a cache of a certain size, the service limits the amount of data you put in the cache to that size. Your application might temporarily have more data in the cache than the size for which you signed up, but the system will soon take corrective action and delete data from your cache to keep your cache size within the provisioned size.

In order to make sure there is fair usage of resources, the service might enforce limitations based on the number of transactions being made against the cache, the total data transfer being consumed, or the number of concurrent connections being used. If you exceed the limitations enforced by the service, your application will be notified by receiving an exception specifying the specific quota limit you have reached.

The table below provides general guideline that can help you plan your usage of the service. This guideline is a high-level estimate and is subject to revision in the future.

Cache Size	Transactions Per Hour	Data Transfers Per Hour (MB)	Concurrent Connections
128MB	400,000	1,400	10
256MB	800,000	2,800	10
512MB	1,600,000	5,600	20
1GB	3,200,000	11,200	40
2GB	6,400,000	22,400	80
4GB	12,800,000	44,800	160

More about Caching

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Virtual Network:

Windows Azure Connect and Windows Azure Traffic Manager are currently in CTP and available at no charge.More about Virtual Network

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Service Bus:

Price

Effective December 10, 2011, Service Bus will be offered at no charge (except for standard data transfer fees). This promotional period will end for all billing months beginning after March 31, 2012. Service Bus will then be charged at the following rates noted below:

• $0.01 per 10,000 messages
• $0.10 per 100 relay hours (this only applies when using the Service Bus Relay capability)

Billing Details

Messages are charged based on the number of messages sent to, or delivered by, the Service Bus during the billing month. This includes delivery of “null” messages in response to receive requests against empty queues/subscriptions. Messages over 64KB in size will be charged an additional message for each additional 64KB of data (rounded up).

Relay hours will be charged from the time of creation to deletion (from when the first listener opens to when the last listener closes on the endpoint) and rounded up to the next whole hour. There is no relay hour charge if you are only using Service Bus Queues and Topics.

In addition to the prices noted above for Service Bus, you will also be charged for the associated data transfers for egress outside the data center that your app is provisioned in.

More about Service Bus

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Access Control:

Price

For AppFabric Access Control transactions, customers will be charged the actual number of transactions utilized for the billing period (i.e., not in discrete blocks of 100,000 transactions), plus data transfers in or out. More about Access Control

Standard pay-as-you-go pricing for Access Control
$1.99 per 100,000 transactions*

*We currently are running a promotion and will not charge for the Access Control service until December 1, 2012.