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/

There are at least three ways to enable e-mail for your Azure applications:

1.Using a custom on-premise Email Forwarder Service.

2. Using Email Server’s Web Services APIs

3.Using a third party SMTP Service

All are described in more depth here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/10/08/adoption-program-insights-sending-emails-from-windows-azure-part-1-of-2.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Please help us understand what scenarios (if any) these patterns don’t address for your applications.

This is on roadmap but ETA isn’t until post Fall 2012. More votes for this feature might help move it up though timing depends on some other factors as well. Mark Berman on the planning team suggested a workaround that involved removing the instance from the front-end load-balancer i.e. so that it doesn’t respond to any requests? RDFE has an API that allows you to stop sending requests to an instance. The idea being that you can have n number of instances in hot standby waiting. This is of course a workaround, but it might address some of the short term need while we wait on the feature.