Offers
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Continue Azure offering free for Developers
After February 1st 2010, it's going to be tough for developers/freelancers/hobbiest to learn, test and deploy azure applications as it's going to be billed for everything.
Like Google AppEngine (http://code.google.com/appengine/whyappengine.html#norisk) Azure should provide free offering for developers with some similar limitations and if the usage goes beyond, one can enter in billing.2,491 votesWe’re working on ways to provide free and low cost onramps for developers, and expect to make more announcements in 2011. Today, there are already multiple ways for developers to get onto Azure cost effectively:
Free Introductory Offer – provides a limited monthly quota of Azure resources at no cost, with standard rates applying above those thresholds: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/
MSDN Premium, Ultimate, and BizSpark Subscription Benefit – provides significantly higher free quotas of Azure resources to MSDN subscribers for several months: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ee461076.aspx
Cloud Essentials for Partners – provides free/low cost access to Azure resources to members of the Microsoft Partner Network. http://www.microsoftcloudpartner.com/
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Reduce cloud costs, specifically storage and bandwidth
Cloud computing might be tempting when you are just starting a company because you don't need to worry about having your own infrastructure. But as you host more and more storage and demand more and more bandwidth, the current cost per GB models become pricey.
There is a now-popular analogy between cars and the cloud. The current cloud offering is advantageous when you rent a car from city A to city B, but if you are traveling too often, you better buy your own.
All the hype around cloud computing set aside, if the cloud is aiming at the next…
436 votes -
Pay per minute instead of pay par hour
One thing that I like the most (and most needed by my business) about cloud computing is ability to fine tune the processing power available to exactly match the demand.
In this respect, I would even more interested if Azure was letting me adjust the number of instances much more aggressively, that is to say if I was charged by the minute and not by the hour.
Indeed, if I have a process that take 1h15, I end-up paying for 2h while I would really prefer to pay 1h15 since I have made the effort to optimize my process so…
304 votes -
Offer a free version for 'Dreamspark' students
As other Microsoft software is available for 'free' for students through the DreamSpark program, why not add a basic Windows Azure plan? It would make it a lot easier for students / educators to learn about Windows Azure and cloud computing, who would otherwise be 'billed for everything'.
211 votes -
CDN is too expensive. What the heck!
Seriously, how is Microsoft hoping to attract big customers to its platform? On AWS, CDN costs as little as $0.030 per GB. That's 5 times less expensive than Azure.
180 votes -
Pay-as-you-go is expensive. Offer bulk bandwidth, bulk storage, bulk CDN, etc. at lower cost
The title speaks for itself. Compared to AWS, Azure lacks bulk offers. Large companies need large volumes of storage and bandwidth. Without cheaper bulk offers, pay-as-you-go rates become very costly.
148 votes -
Why not available in my country?
I tried to buy an zure plan today and suddenly after 10 minutes of registration i found a message telling me the service is not supported in your country. i live in UAE
why it's not supported ? and why there is no such information about that67 votesWe’re actively reviewing new locations for Windows Azure sites and are working with partners to enable them to provide services in geo locations were sites aren’t otherwise planned. So please keep the feedback coming as to locations were you would like to have Windows Azure available, as this is valuable input into our expansion plans. That said, building out geo diverse hosting environments is a nontrivial task and it takes time to build the requisite site and spin up the associated infrastructure. We’re working to accelerate this process and to make it easier to navigate the requirements involved in deploying to additional locations, but the timeframe to expand to all the geographies we would like will be measured in years rather than months.
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49 votes
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More CPU Power
I would like to choices other than 1.6 GHz CPU.(Just like AmazonEC2)
40 votes -
38 votes
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37 votes
At PDC 2010 Microsoft announced the Extra Small Instance, which will be priced at $0.05 per compute hour in order to make the process of development, testing and trial easier. This will make it affordable for developers interested in running smaller applications on the platform. A beta of this role will be available before the end of 2010.
What other pricing models would you like to see in Azure?
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Billing: do not charge for stopped (suspended) deployments.
Users do not have the expectation that once the deployment is suspended, it is somehow still on and running. Therefore, there should be no charge. No service is provided by Microsoft when deployments are in the suspended state.
36 votes -
Turkey
I'm Turkish add could't find 3 mouth trial support for Turkey. I'm offended.
Just kidding not offended.
24 votes -
Make long-term pricing clear, simple, predictable (no hidden or unpredictable costs)
Our experience with "pay as you go" services -- not only from Microsoft -- is that managers are very reluctant to bet the farm on someone potentially volatile pricing policy. What is required is a simple, easy to find and use, fixed or "flat rate" scenario that is comparable to an owned-machine scenario: no hidden or unpredictable costs ... and the variable costs are clearly denoted and covered by a ceiling threshold. The first question is: is it real and dependable. The second question is: what are the real and dependable costs...
23 votes -
Build hosting centers in South Africa
Supports local economies...
22 votes -
Create great silverlight video streaming offerings
Enable a developer to pull together several easy to use Azure capablities - video upload, ingestion (chunking into multiple bit-rates/formats), delivery through the CDN (https for paid content, geofenced for content that only only have right to or leagally able to deliver in region), and the ability to instrument and provide analyitcs on the use of the video stream for advertisers or media companies to use.
18 votes -
Allow me to pay for increased entities/second from a table storage account
Amazon's DynamoDB offers the ability to scale access to a single table, while Azure Table Storage is limited to 5000 entities/account. With Azure Federations now in place, this seems like the last remaining bottleneck for my application as it grows.
Spreading my data across multiple accounts is a suboptimal solution because (1) it requires an additional layer of complexity in my application, (2) these accounts are not free in that I must request more of them from Microsoft myself every time I need more, (3) I'm not guaranteed to get more than 20 (5 to start, 20 if you go…
16 votes -
Bizspark MSDN Azure Accounts Should Allow Enough Hours For 2 Roles
Start up's that are using Bizspark to get involved with Azure are not able to take full advantage of Azure without having pay additionally.
Example, Azure best practices requires at least 2 roles. Either 1 Web Role and 1 Worker Role, or 2 Web Roles for SLA. A business trying to build on top of Azure cannot implement these best practices without paying for the second role.
13 votes -
Service bus should not charge for registering an endpoint.
Apparently, the sb charges when you register an endpoint and not when a connection is made.
13 votes -
Add CDN locations in every country where Azure is sold (possibly via a partner program)
Local bandwith can make or break the success of Windows Azure - establish CDN nodes in all the countries where the service is (or will soon be) sold.
10 votesAt PDC 2010, we announced that we will be adding new CDN nodes in the Middle East and improve existing connectivity in Brazil and the US. Stay tuned for more announcements going forward!
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