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Want to use Windows Azure for a couple of projects but as I haven't used it yet I am wondering how I can work out what I need to charge the end client as the cost can fluctuate based on usage/storage etc.
I would appreciate any comments on how others have firstly quoted costs when suggesting Azure to an end customer and how they charge for each month i.e. set monthly figure subject to change?
You should only get between your customer and the Azure charges if you are building a Software as a Service application or some similar multi-tenant application. In these cases what you charge should only be loosely related to Azure charges and may be difficult to figure out. You could, for example, measure outgoing bytes per tenant, but with difficulty.
If you are building an application on Azure for one customer, there is no reason to become a charges intermediary. Sit the customer down and walk them through setting up an Azure account - with their own credit card. Once they have the account created, they can make you an administrator. Have Microsoft invoice the customer directly and don't get involved. There are a few reasons for this:
Customer knowledge and control of costs is one of the benefits of the cloud. Having an educated customer, that understands and controls their costs is a good customer to have - and removes a lot of complicated explaining.
Azure pricing is public. If you add a margin the customer may feel ripped off.
You have no idea of the future load of the application and cannot take the risk on setting a fixed price. If you have the cash to take the risk, the price that you will charge to cover that risk will make it too expensive.
To start off with, using the Azure pricing calculator is fine. The pricing calculator breaks down when doing more complex things, but for an initial quote it is good enough. As a developer you should have an idea of the number of roles, databases, and so on, to feed into the initial pricing calculation.
Many things, and many architectural decisions affect the costs, so the cost model has to be continuously maintained and updated. One of the biggest factors is the load, which at least at the beginning, you probably have no medium-term clue what it is. Have a look at CALM, and reference the lifecycle and cost models for more insight.
If you feel you have to generate ongoing income from the application, rather enter into a support agreement using a flat rate or your own model (say $20 per month per role).
In summary, use the pricing calculator for ballpark figures, but let Microsoft bill the customer directly.
Related
I have an Azure Cloud Service published at Microsoft and it's draining all my credit!
Payment
Pay as you go
Service resource
Minimal resource, 1 SMALL web role and 1 SMALL worker role.
I knew Azure wasn't cheap, but this is just too much. Currently my monthly cost is just under 80 USD. The only person that use this service is me, noone else, and I barely use it. So the cost is just for the upkeep.
Is this normal?
70 bucks a month!?
How much does it cost for YOU?
What Microsoft support told me
I am afraid the Cloud Services has a fixed price, and I am not aware
how it could be lowered. Maybe you want to check on how the service
itself could be tweaked to get it working as per your needs. You may
want to go through the Community Forum for that.
Community = Stackoverflow, so here I am!
If I look at my Azure subscription page I can see that it's the:
CALCULATING HOURS - Europe, Western
That is taking all my hard earned money. My service also uses SQL, storage and cache but, if I understand it correctly, these are not the cause for my expensive bill.
Before I leave you to it I just want to say that I can't use a simple web app because of my requirements. I know web apps are super cheap, but in this case I must use a cloud service..
Thank you
Update
I found out I was using A1 (small) and not A0 (extra small). The instance type for a cloudservice can be set in the servicedefinition file.
It's sad that not even Microsoft themselves could inform me about this.
Web and worker roles are like dedicated VMs if they are on, they will cost you money.
You can do one of two things
1) Stop the machines when no one is using them ( say in the off business hours). I am not sure if this is possible to do or not in your case. But if it is possible, you can run a small script to start/ stop the roles. You can even do so via apps on your phone. For example - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/azure-management/id826446897?mt=8
2) Move to Azure Web Apps and Azure Web Jobs - Both these services are "multi-tenant" and cost much less and in fact offer a free tier. If and when you need to scale, you can always scale as your need
Hope this helps
Windows Azure has a store.
The stuff you can by there are called Add-Ons, and they fall in two categories: Service and data.
I understand the point of some of the service offerings, but not all, and I don't yet understand the point of the data offerings at all.
With services, some offerings are database deployments such as ClearDB (MySQL) and MongoLab. That makes sense to me: You get those databases deployed and monitored with a few clicks, yet those databases run in the same data center as the applications that consume them, which is good for performance and security.
For most other services (there is a simple scheduler application, for example), it seems that the only advantage is the unified billing method. Is that a correct observation, or is there more to it?
Then the data offerings: The fact that I can buy bing query transactions cannot really have anything to do with the rest of my azure account, right? Technically, it's just bing (or whatever other data offering you look at) and presumably I'm going against the same bing api that I would have used previously (I'm assuming that was possible). There is nothing really deployed in any Azure data center the moment I buy it, is there? So in what sense is that an Add-On?
In a nutshell, am I missing something or are most Add-Ons just a method of buying external services and having the billed on my Azure account?
If you can answer the question for other 'app stores', you can answer it for Windows Azure. We know about THE App Store (as per the court battles over the name) which is the only way to get applications onto the closed (iOS) device. There is also a Mac App Store which would seem unnecessary because of the ability to install apps by yourself (which makes it more similar to the Azure store). In this case the reason for the store is discoverability, association with the store brand (where the buyer assumes a degree of vetting), a single point for updates, and simplified billing.
The Windows Azure Store (and data marketplace) exist for similar reasons. It is less about the technical benefits than the association with the Azure brand. Since SO is technical, let me highlight some (largely) technical aspects:
Don't assume that the service will run in the same data centre. In most cases it probably won't.
There is an advantage of having everything in one place from an operational point of view. Granting of operator access to the subscription means that you don't have to administer accounts on the service. I have had problems with this though - where the service made it difficult to do other things (such as get support) because the Azure identity wasn't handled very well. (I had this with New Relic).
The combined billing works on credit card payments only. Last time I checked (Summer 2013) there was no way to get an add-on with a pay-by-invoice subscription, so a second subscription (with credit card) was needed anyway.
Add-ons seems to still be in 'preview', which may indicate low adoption. Microsoft probably hasn't seen it grow the way they expected and may not be developing it much in future. This is opinion only, and shouldn't affect the service (after all the store is just a gateway, and has no (little) technical impact on the service provided)
Don't completely ignore the store however. The biggest benefit seems to be the free tier of the servers and reduced pricing, where Microsoft has managed to get service providers to make the store attractive. For example, the SendGrid free option provides 25,000 emails per month, and there doesn't seem to be a free option on SendGrid.com. New Relic pricing was (and maybe still is) significantly less.
Pay attention mainly to the pricing benefits, rather than perceived technical benefits.
I'm looking for some answers, on Azure from people who are hosting there on the mini account, i.e. 10 free sites.
Specifically:
After the 90 days is it free for life, as far as you dont exceed the compute
What thresholds do they set.
If the threshold is exceeded do they charge or turn your service off for that period/month
The trial period and 10 sites free for life is tempting for developers but hard to understand, and very confusing. We realize Azure is trying to match/compete with the free Amazon account for elastic computing. But, the services are not clear.
On the following page
http://www.microsoft.com/Web/webmatrix/signin.aspx
It states "If you don’t already have Windows Azure Web Sites, you'll be prompted to sign up for a free trial, which includes 10 web sites that you can keep even after the free trial ends."
What exactly does this mean which includes 10 web sites that you can keep even after the free trial ends?? Does it mean, if I dont cross the compute allocations, I can keep it for life, like officelive for small business that you had earlier
While I can't give a definitive answer on what the future may bring (considering Web Sites is in Preview), I can point out a few specifics you may or may not have seen:
First: General Availability pricing is now documented. That is, when Web Sites leaves Preview, the pricing is now published. Here's a snippet showing the Free tier and its associated resources (disk, CPU, etc.).
Next: Pricing time period. The 90-day trial includes a whole bunch of free resources, one of them being 10 free sites on Web Sites. If you continue after the 90-day trial, you pay for consumed resources. However: There remains a free tier for Web Sites (with all the abovementioned resources included for free as well). And currently, this page states that those 10 free sites will remain in effect for 12 months following the end of the trial:
Now: Will your 10 free sites go beyond 12 months? I frankly don't know. However: The Pricing page does call out a Free tier. And there's documentation showing you'd be good for at least a year. Beyond that, I think we'll need to wait for General Availability to hit and see if there's any update to the pricing scheme.
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We need to use our ERP as SAAS (Software As A Service). We tried the Azure trial for three months, and technically was a succes. But, when we use RemoteApp services, the system asked for licenses (after 90 days), but We don't know if it is possible to paying monthly or how to obtain the licenses.
We have the great business opportunity, but I tried to contact microsfot support in Guatemala (Central America), and they always offered responses in 48 hrs. but after a month I haven't received any response. My no. ticket is 130109017590.
Can anyone help me with my explain how licensing works in Azure?
I think you are asking about licensing in Azure. If you are talking about something else please let me know.
Azure is set up as a Pay as You Go model where your initial monthly bill is $0 and it goes up from there based on how many resources you use. Resources in this case can be computing hours (i.e. you have a package deployed to a Cloud Service via Web or Worker Role)
Most of the functionality in Azure falls under the Platform as a Service, where the details of networking, hardware, OS, etc. are handled for you and you just focus on building and deploying applications. That being said, all of the licensing that you might normally have to worry about on an on-premise implementation is taken care of in Azure.
That just leaves billing. Billing in Azure is pretty straightforward. Smaller accounts (those that don't have an EA) are just set up with a credit card when you create the account. You will be billed on a given interval (monthly) for all of the resources you used in the previous month.
i have an idea of putting my blog on to Azure instead of a regular webhosting company.
The only thing i cannot figure out is if that will be cheaper or not. The good part is the getting-knowledge of Azure but on the other hand it is my personal blog and i really don't wanna spend to much money on it.
So do you have any idea of how the pricing works? I saw some calculator but didn't manage to understand the numbers.
Thanks in advance
You'd have to have a significantly-active blog to justify the costs of Azure. Aside from keeping a web role up and running (and just one instance chews up almost $90 monthly, as ZippyV stated), you'll also have to pay for data.
You do NOT need to invest in SQL Azure though. There's Azure table storage which is much better suited for your blog. It has a table structure, you can define entities (e.g. classes, maybe a BlogEntryClass) that are stored, and the storage costs will run you significantly less than SQL Azure (only $0.15 per GB per month, so your storage costs will likely remain well under a dollar a month for a blog, a small fraction of the cost of SQL Azure).
You'll also pay for bandwidth ($0.15 outbound per GB).
If this is a learning exercise, it's a great investment, but if you have an MSDN Premium account, you can host your blog there - you get 750 compute-hours monthly (enough to run a single role instance 24x7), 10GB table storage, and 14GB monthly outbound data.
Classic webhosting will be a lot cheaper for you. In Azure you need to pay for at least 1 instance (webserver) to run per hour. At then end of the month you will have to pay about 89$ if I remember correctly and that's without SQL Server.
If you want to learn more on how to develop for Azure you can download the SDK and run your project locally. You don't need to pay for it.
EDIT: you can find the pricing here. If you want to add SQL server you pay a minimum of 100$ a month.