Windows Azure Platform
SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core
SQL Azure is a tool from the Windows Azure platform which provides you with the database services you need. It gives you the time to focus on developing applications without having to worry about building, administering or maintaining databases.
This promotional offer provides SQL Azure database at a deeply discounted monthly price. The offer is valid only for a six month term but can be renewed once at the same base unit rate. Customers may purchase multiple Base Units to match their development needs.
Base Unit Pricing:
$74.95 per Base Unit per month for the initial subscription term of six months, which can be renewed once at the same Base Unit price.
Monthly usage exceeding the amount included in the Base Units purchased will be charged at the rates indicated in the Overage Pricing section.
This is a one-time promotional offer and represents 25% off of our normal consumption rates.
Subscription term: 6 months
Base Unit Includes:
SQL Azure
1 Business Edition database (10 GB relational database)
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Overage Pricing:Monthly usage exceeding the amount included in the Base Units purchased will be charged at the standard rates:
Windows Azure
Compute*
Extra small instance**: $0.05 per hour
Small instance (default): $0.12 per hour
Medium instance: $0.24 per hour
Large instance: $0.48 per hour
Extra large instance: $0.96 per hour
Virtual Network***
Windows Azure Connect – No charge during CTP
Storage
$0.15 per GB stored per month
$0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
$0.15 per GB for data transfers from European and North American locations
$0.20 per GB for data transfers from other locations
$0.01 per 10,000 transactions
SQL Azure
Web Edition
$9.99 per database up to 1GB per month
$49.95 per database up to 5GB per month
Business Edition
$99.99 per database up to 10GB per month
$199.98 per database up to 20GB per month
$299.97 per database up to 30GB per month
$399.96 per database up to 40GB per month
$499.95 per database up to 50GB per month
Windows Azure platform AppFabric
Access Control****
$1.99 per 100,000 transactions
Service Bus
$3.99 per connection on a “pay-as-you-go” basis
Pack of 5 connections $9.95
Pack of 25 connections $49.75
Pack of 100 connections $199.00
Pack of 500 connections $995.00
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
Data Transfers
North America and Europe regions
$0.10 per GB in
$0.15 per GB out
Asia Pacific Region
$0.10 per GB in
$0.20 per GB out
Inbound data transfers during off-peak times through June 30, 2011 are at no charge.
*Compute hours are calculated based on the number of hours that your application is deployed. Please refer to the Compute Instances section of this offer for further details.
**Extra small compute instances are available in beta and are billed separately from other compute instance sizes.
***The Windows Azure Connect service is available in Community Technology Preview (CTP).
****No charge for billing periods before January 1, 2012.
*****The Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service is provided at no charge for billing periods prior to August 1, 2011.
Payment Options:Customers may pay by credit card, debit card or invoice. Invoice requires an initial monthly base commitment exceeding $500 per month for customers in the United States and $250 per month elsewhere. Customers choosing to pay by invoice may have their service activation delayed pending credit verification.
Pricing Details:Windows Azure Storage is billed based on your average usage during a billing period of blob, table, queue and drive storage. 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.
We charge a monthly fee for each SQL Azure database, but we amortize that database fee over the month and charge for the number of databases used on a daily basis. This daily fee is dependent on which database type (e.g., 1 GB Web Edition, 10 GB Business Edition, etc.) and number of databases you use. You pay based on the total number of databases that existed at any point during a particular day. For presentation on your bill, all usage for Web Edition databases is converted into the 1 GB size and all Business Edition usage is converted into the 10 GB size. For example, if you utilized a 50 GB Business Edition database, your bill will display this as five 10 GB databases.
During the six month term of this subscription, you may increase the number of Base Units you purchase at any time. Any increase in Base Units will be effective as of the next billing cycle. Base Units may only be decreased at time of renewal.
Any unused portion of a Base Unit will not be refunded or carried over to the next billing cycle. The amount of service included in each Base Unit will not change during the term of your subscription.
You will be notified at least 30 days in advance of any changes to the above standard rates. Your price per Base Unit will not change during the duration of your subscription term.
The Windows Azure Connect service is available in Community Technology Preview (CTP). There is no charge for this service during the CTP and no service level agreement is provided.
New services may be added periodically to the Windows Azure platform. We will notify you in advance of these new services and any fees that might be charged for using them. However, you would only be charged if you elect to use the new services
Any taxes which may result from receiving services at no charge are the sole responsibility of the recipient.
Compute Instances:
Windows Azure compute instances come in five unique sizes to enable complex applications and workloads.
Compute Instance Size CPU Memory Instance Storage I/O Performance
Extra Small 1 GHz 768 MB 20 GB* Low
Small 1.6 GHz 1.75 GB 225 GB Moderate
Medium 2 x 1.6 GHz 3.5 GB 490 GB High
Large 4 x 1.6 GHz 7 GB 1,000 GB High
Extra large 8 x 1.6 GHz 14 GB 2,040 GB High
* There is a limitation on the Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) size if you are deploying a Virtual Machine role on an extra small instance. The VHD can only be up to 15 GB.
Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server. Although many resources are dedicated to a particular instance, some resources associated to I/O performance, such as network bandwidth and disk subsystem, are shared among the compute instances on the same physical host. During periods when a shared resource is not fully utilized, you are able to utilize a higher share of that resource.
The different instance types will provide different minimum performance from the shared resources depending on their size. Compute instance sizes with a high I/O performance indicator as noted in the table above will have a larger allocation of the shared resources. Having a larger allocation of the shared resource will also result in more consistent I/O performance.
Windows Azure offers an extra small compute instance that is appropriate for the following purposes:
Web roles that have very low traffic or requires only short burst of processing capability
Worker roles that require little CPU processing power or low memory consumption
Prototypes of a Windows Azure service
Demonstrations of how Windows Azure works
Roles that are used for monitoring purposes which need to wake up infrequently
We suggest that you try out the extra small compute instance to verify its suitability for your applications before deployment to production. For predictable performance, we suggest that you use the small, medium, large or extra large instances.
Our Virtual Machine (VM) role is currently in beta. This role provides support for more types of new and existing Windows applications and enables moving more existing applications to the cloud by deploying the same VHD to both the cloud and on-premises data centers. During the beta period, compute instances running a VM role will be charged in the same manner as other compute instances. You will also incur charges at our normal storage rates for the costs incurred to store your VHD image. A service level agreement is provided during the beta period of VM role.
Calculating Compute Hours
Windows Azure compute hours are charged only when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, you will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Please note that suspending your deployment will still result in compute charges since the compute instances are still allocated to you and cannot be allocated to another customer. Compute hours are billed based on the number of clock hours your service was deployed multiplied by the number of compute instances. If you have two tenants deployed for a hosted service, one for staging and one for production, both will be charged as both are utilizing Windows Azure platform resources.
All compute hours, except for extra small compute instances, 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 correlates to the number of small compute instance hours:
Compute Instance Size Clock Hours Small Instance Hours
Small 1 hour 1 hour
Medium 1 hour 2 hours
Large 1 hour 4 hours
Extra large 1 hour 8 hours
Compute Instance Conversion Rate Table
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 for two 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 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.
Extra small compute instances are calculated in the same manner as noted above except they are billed separately. The monthly compute hours included in an offer cannot be used towards extra small instances. Extra small compute instances are currently in beta and a service level agreement is provided.
Data Transfer Details (except for CDN):Our data transfer rates are determined by the region in which your solution is deployed. Data transfers between 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:
Regions Sub Regions
Asia Pacific East Asia
Southeast Asia
Europe North Europe
Western Europe
North America North Central US
South Central US
Peak vs. Off-Peak
Off-peak times are 10:00 p.m. – 6:00 a.m. during weekdays and from 10:00 p.m. on Friday to 6:00 a.m. on Monday for weekends as determined using one standard time zone for each region. The standard time zones utilized for each region are listed below:
Region Time Zone UTC
North America Pacific Standard Time UTC-8
Europe Western European Time UTC
Asia Pacific Singapore Standard Time UTC+8
The off-peak time periods are not adjusted for daylight savings time. For example, during daylight savings time, the off-peak times in the North America region will be 11:00 p.m. – 7:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) during weekdays and 11:00 p.m. PDT on Friday through 7:00 a.m. PDT on Monday for weekends.
Content Delivery Network
Windows Azure CDN data transfer charges are based on the data center location from where the traffic was served, not based on the end user’s location. The four data center regions for CDN include:
•Asia Pacific
•Europe
•Latin America
•North America
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 Europe and Asia Pacific. However, some users may be served from one of our other geographic regions 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 North America 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.
Cancellation Policy:You may cancel without penalty during the first 30 days of each subscription term. You are still responsible to pay for the base commitment and any overage for that first month. Cancellations after the first 30 days of a subscription term require full payment of the base commitment for the remaining months of the subscription and any overage incurred.
Renewal Policy:After your initial six month subscription term, you will have the option to renew only once for another six month term at existing promotional rates at a 25% discount off standard consumption rates in effect at the time of your renewal. At the end of your second six month subscription term, you will have the option to renew your subscription at whatever renewal rate we have at that time, which currently is $79.99. You may change the amount of your base commitment at time of renewal but you must commit to at least one Base Unit in order to renew.
In the Microsoft Online Customer Portal (MOCP), your subscription will by default be automatically set to renew. You will be notified via e-mail when your term is about to renew. You do have the ability to opt out of auto renew in MOCP at anytime.
Offer Availability:
This offer is available for purchase through June 30, 2011 to customers located in one of the following countries and will be billed in the currency noted:
Austria € EUR
Australia $ AUD
Belgium € EUR
Brazil $ USD
Canada $ CAD
Chile $ USD
Columbia $ USD
Costa Rica $ USD
Cyprus € EUR
Czech Republic € EUR
Denmark kr DKK
Finland € EUR
France € EUR
Germany € EUR
Greece € EUR
Hong Kong $ USD
Hungary € EUR
India $ USD
Ireland € EUR
Israel $ USD
Italy € EUR
Japan ¥ JPY
Luxemburg € EUR
Malaysia $ USD
Mexico $ USD
Netherlands € EUR
New Zealand $ NZD
Norway kr NOK
Peru $USD
Philippines $ USD
Poland € EUR
Portugal € EUR
Puerto Rico $ USD
Romania € EUR
Singapore $ USD
Spain € EUR
Sweden kr SEK
Switzerland Fr CHF
Trinidad and Tobago $ USD
United Kingdom £ GBP
United States $ USD
Usage Quotas:As a default, we set the following monthly usage quotas. Because we understand that you may need more than these limits, please contact customer service at any time so that we can understand your needs and adjust these limits appropriately.
For all resources except compute, your default usage quotas are the greater of either twice the amount included in your purchased Base Units or the standard quota, as calculated on an item by item basis with usage aggregated across all of your subscriptions. For compute instances, your usage quota is as noted below:
Monthly Commitment* Quota**
0 – 150 Greater of 20 or 2 times your monthly commitment
> 150 300+ (1.2 times your monthly commitment greater than 150)
*Monthly commitment represents the number of equivalent small compute instances (i.e., per 750 hours) that you have purchased on a commitment basis.
**Quota represents the maximum number of small compute instances (or their equivalent) that you can have running at any point in time. For purposes of this quota, an extra small compute instance is counted the same as a small compute instance.
Standard Quotas
Windows Azure
Compute
20 concurrent small compute instances or an equivalent number of other sized compute instances as determined using the Compute Instance Conversion Rate Table. For purposes of this quota, an extra small compute instance is counted the same as a small compute instance.
Virtual Network*
Windows Azure Connect
20 endpoints
350 GB of total data transfers per month
Storage
5 concurrent storage accounts
Content Delivery Network
10 TB of total data transfers per month
SQL Azure
150 Web Edition databases
15 Business Edition databases
AppFabric
100 million Access Control transactions per month
500 Service Bus connections
20 GB of Caching per month
Data Transfers (excluding CDN)
10 TB of total data transfers per month
*These quotas apply to the Community Technology Preview. They will be adjusted for the service’s commercial release.
While we do reserve the right to disable a customer’s account that has exceeded its usage quotas in a given month, we will provide e-mail notification and make multiple attempts to contact a customer before taking any action. Customers exceeding the above quotas will still be responsible for charges that exceed the quotas.
There are additional situations that may require us to disable a customer’s account, including non-payment of fees. For further details, please refer to our Online Services Use Rights for the Windows Azure platform that is published at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/onlineuserights/english.
Service Level Agreements:
We offer a set of robust service level agreements for each of the Windows Azure platform services. More details on each of our SLAs can be found at the links below:
Windows Azure Compute SLA
Windows Azure Storage SLA
Windows Azure CDN SLA
SQL Azure SLA
Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus SLA
Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control SLA
Windows Azure AppFabric Caching SLA
Service level agreements for the Windows Azure extra small compute instances beta and VM role beta will be the same as the Windows Azure Compute SLA above. Service level agreements are not provided for services during a Community Technology Preview (CTP), which currently includes Windows Azure Connect.
Resource Commitment:
Microsoft will provide services to you up to at least the level of the associated usage included in the base units you purchased (the Service Commitment), but all other increases in usage levels of service resources (e.g. adding to the number of compute instances running, or increasing the amount of storage in use) are subject to the availability of these service resources. Any quota described in the Usage Quotas section is not a Service Commitment. For purposes of determining the number of simultaneous small compute instances (or their equivalent) that Microsoft will provide as part of a Service Commitment, this is determined by dividing the number of committed small compute instance hours purchased in a month by the number of hours in the shortest month of the year (i.e., February – 672 hours).