At this year’s Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft unveiled the pay-as-you-go pricing for its Windows Azure platform, which includes a cloud services operating system, a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), as well as connectivity and interoperability with .NET Services. Microsoft will offer a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume, in the following structure (bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB):

• Windows Azure:
  • Compute @ $0.12 / hour
  • Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
  • Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K
• SQL Azure:
  • Web Edition – Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
  • Business Edition – Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99
• .NET Services:
  • Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens continue