Azure Commercial Availability Confirmed, Business Model Announced and More..

Yesterday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform including service level agreements and support programs.

Here are few highlights from the announcement.

· Commercial availability at Professional Developers Conference 2009 in November’09.

· SQL Azure will be available later this summer as a cloud-based relational database platform built on SQL Server.

· Free until the release in November. Now is the time to go check out the free CTP.

You can sign-up for the free CTP account for Windows Azure & .NET Services at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx.

The Windows Azure platform, which includes a cloud services operating system – Windows Azure, a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), as well as connectivity and interoperability services with .NET Services.

The pricing model will be a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.

Here is a summary of the pricing:

Additionally the service-level agreement will cover service uptime, connectivity, and data availability and will be backed by a enterprise-class guarantee as outlined in the Windows Azure blog:

“For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action. For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.”

Michael Jackson’s Memorial Service Available Via Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming

 

In less than 3 hrs the Michael Jackson memorial service will be underway and Microsoft will be broadcasting the Michael Jackson memorial, live in HD from the Staples Center in Los Angeles using Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming (the technologies used for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, 2009 NCAA March Madness, Netflix, etc.). And this event will be available worldwide to anyone who has an internet connection.

Visit the Sympatico / MSN inMusic website, at http://inmusic.ca/news_and_features/Michael_Jackson, for up-to-date content, and special tributes to the King of Pop. The Silverlight player providing the live streaming service will become available at the time of the event (2009.07.07 10AM Pacific Time / 1PM Eastern Time).

Also visit MSN for additional information and special coverage on Michael Jackson, at http://entertainment.uk.msn.com/music/michael-jackson.aspx. And visit a DeepZoom (also in Silverlight) collage of hundreds of Michael Jackson’s pictures, at http://www.msn.michaeljackson.shoothill.com/.