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.”