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.
anonymous
shared this idea
We’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/
56 comments
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benk
commented
What is a month any half decent app will take months probably years to develop and it will take a number of years more before it makes any real money..
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Juan
commented
"Not only is creating an App Engine application easy, it's free! You can create an account and publish an application that people can use right away at no charge, and with no obligation. When you need to use more resources, you can enable billing and allocate your budget according to your needs"
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Sean Haddy commented
Dreamspark should have free membership!
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ray247
commented
There should be a way to have a free or low cost offerings to developers in general, not just MSDN subscribers or BizSpark users. Like Amazon is giving a small Linux instance for free for a full year. A free/low cost offering would really help us to try and be more confident in developing apps for Azure for the future.
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schwartzberg
commented
allow ceilings on azure service consumption, thus cost ceilings. Free premliminary thresh-hold (like for msdn premium developers), cuts entry costs, but in principle there is no ceiling. Any demo i make, that is succcessful for users of it, can have costs shoot through the clouds!
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mendel
commented
yep, free student version or something would be great :-)
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jinishans commented
Hi Haris
I think the BizSpark stuff is really good, 8 months + 8 months. It'll be useful for small startups.
The issue here is, time is running out, this month on month 25 hrs is Horrible. I've registered for that, deployed a Hello World app, forgot to switch off, Gosh, I got a $60-70 bill a month back. For what, for just deploying my Hello World Azure app, cos it's running, NO Activity.
Man, this is what we're asking to go. Remove that 25hrs, make it 750 hrs (min. 720 hrs / month) FREE for developers, with 1 SQL Server DB, Allow Multiple web apps in 1 webrole. Allow Developers to learn Azure.
We can't spend whole day / month to learn this. Probably 10-20 hrs / month, in our tight work schedule.
Common folks, see AWS, it's already started, I've registered there though being a .NET guy since .NET 1.0 was in Alpha, jumped in 2001/02 from J2EE, now if Azure is not going to be FREE for Developers, we're forced to go back to Java with Amazon AWS Free program, and propose such thing in our next projects to our customers, no other way. Without we learning/trying out Azure, No one, I'm telling, No one is going to recommend/plan for their next project.
Bring it On, Now !
Regards
jinishans -
All, thanks for your continued input. Please keep it coming! We're actively working on ways to provide compelling free or low cost offers to developers, so "Planned" is the appropriate status for this item. We'll have more announcements to make in the coming months.
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stevencasey commented
Hi Harris,
Another +1 for comments from Steven Nagy, please remove the planned status on this idea.
This idea is a request for people who are NOT a MS partner. I'm looking at this from a developer/hobbyist learning perspective. I am a professional software engineer who is not using azure currently as part of my work. I may be interested working with this technology in the future and look to experimenting and learning with it now. -
We wan't something like CloudSpark with FREE space to host anything we want. No Frills. Not later, Not in Jan, Right now. Cos, 2011 is going to be cloud year, our clients are already allocating budgets for Cloud, but, we can't even try before we jump on it. PERIOD.
Otherwise, Azure is going to fail not only in public space, it's going to fail in enterprise also. Cos, we people like Consultants, Architects, Developers need to know what this Fking thking before we propose for any enterprise projects.
Did anyone at MS get that...? -
Brian Watson commented
Hi Harris
I agree with Steven Nagy. It is great for partners who tend to be large companies who could probably aford to pay. It is the independent developer, student, self-employed etc. who need free access if they are to use Azure rather than Google. -
Steven Nagy
commented
Hi Haris,
No this does not actually target the requested idea which was to offer free access to developers/freelancers/hobbiests. Your response only covers partners. Please change the status of this idea as appropriate and indicate if there will be free access for non-partners.
Cheers,
Steve -
Slav
commented
sounds good - it's definitely a step in the right direction. I think in terms of Azure pricing for devs Microsoft should look more at Google and less at Amazon...
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John Clayton
commented
@Haris
Definitely a good step in the right direction. Between the extra small instances (still haven't seen specs yet) and the multiple web sites per roll this makes Azure a much better offering for the very small to medium sites.
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We made two announcement at PDC today that should help reduce the cost of using Azure . The first relates to the introduction of an "Extra Small" Azure instance intended to provide developers with a more cost effective training and development environment. The seond is the introduction of a new "Cloud Essentials Pack" offer that replaces our existing partner offers. This offer provides free access to the Windows Azure platform including 750 extra small instance hours and a SQL Azure database per month at no charge, and will be available to Microsoft Partner Network members beginning January 7, 2011.
What do you think of these two offers?
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chintan.tyagi
commented
There is no way developer community would continue to use tools or new business would adopt Azure based applications if the technology is not proven.. and at this stage providing Azure free for developer is the only way...
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Matt Cooper
commented
Yup we need to compete with GAE in terms of free small quota, then billable after that. Would increase adoption of the platform I'm sure.
I know maybe MSoft would need to make some changes, ie dynamically load apps on request as Google do but that should all be possible. -
Fabrizio
commented
I'd like a completely free Azure plan (like Google App Engine).
- a small amount of free resource
- if you need more resources, you'll give a credit card and it will be billed.But, if I don't need extra resources, I must not forced to insert a credit card number. In this scenario, if I get all the res, my app will be stopped for a while (1 hour, 1 day).
Please, consider how Google App Engine works. It's a very good model.
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ryancrawcour
commented
how would MS control this "free developer" account? there would have to be restrictions, else what stops me from running commercial applications under a free acount?
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Federico Lois
commented
Hi Mark,
I can speak for our team, that it is already developing on Azure commercially. The realities of the actual state of the technology is that some things work on the Development Sandbox, and some only work on the real environment (there is a huge mismatch between the two, as time pass they will get better but such things are inevitable even for world class development teams). As a developer it is not enough for me being able to test on the Sandbox without disrupting my normal site operation, when you have a team of 8 developers it is not scalable to have a single staging environment.
Moreover, we were faced with the requirement of an elastic platform and the BDMs took the risk. We had never worked on Azure before, but the requirements guaranted the decision. For projects that may not have such a hard requirement, if the developers havent played arround with the platform the risk for the BDM and TDM is just too high.
For example, as noted before, our biggest risks materialized on the deployment on what we call "the real" Azure :), that is why it is important to have very small free environments for developers to play around. If we would have know what we were against us, some mistakes would have been avoided.
Greetings
Federico
