How does the Windows Azure platform pricing compare to that offered by Amazon Web Services?
First, Amazon is an IaaS provider, whereas the Windows Azure platform is a PaaS offering from Microsoft. That means, capabilities such as the operating system, database, load balancing, backup, automated service management, auto high availability, physical administration, integrated development environment, and monitoring are built into the Windows Azure platform. Second, Amazon has multi-tiered pricing for its various AWS offerings. Based on publicly available data and customer conversations, it’s clear that most customer needs map to the higher Amazon pricing tiers. The Windows Azure pricing is lower as compared to many of these higher Amazon price points. Instead of adding the complexity of multiple tiers, we give our customers flat pricing based on their consumption of compute, storage, data transfers etc. As a design principle, we’ve reduced the complexity around multiple standalone meters – E.g. While Amazon EC2 has 9 meters to track usage, Windows Azure has only 4. These pricing
