Prices of Microsoft Azure services

Main article: Microsoft Azure

2018: Reduction in cost of technical support

In January, 2018 Microsoft reduced three times the cost of a customer support of Azure and lowered time necessary for accomplishment of crucial addresses.

Since January 26, 2018, the price of standard technical and billing support for users of Azure is the fixed $100 a month instead of former $300, writes the CRN IT edition with reference to the blog posting of Microsoft.

Microsoft reduced three times the cost of technical support of users of Azure

The New Signature company (the leading Microsoft partner of Azure) consider that these innovations will very positively affect on end users and can involve more clients in use of cloud infrastructure of Microsoft.

Before for receiving support on workloads we recommended to clients who have no agreements of Enterprise Agreement, to purchase the level of a packet of support Professional Direct which still costs $1000 a month — the technical director of New Signature Reed Wiedower reported.

He noted that for the clients using Professional Direct, expense reduction since 1000 to 100 dollars a month is very significant so Azure should have more users.

In addition to reduction in cost of technical support services, Microsoft accelerated time of processing of critical requests from two to one o'clock.

With these changes of Azure offers the most economic and predictable support among all large cloud providers, said in the statement of Microsoft now.

According to observers of CRN, expenses on support of Azure were burdensome for business clients, many of which were forced to spend for these purposes about a quarter of the budget on cloud services.

The state clients will also notice an essential difference in the cost of technical support of Azure: for them expenses are reduced from $375 to $125 a month.^[1]

2016

Azure virtual machines fell in price again

In October, 2016 the American company Microsoft announced the next reduction of prices of Azure virtual machines. The size of a discount reaches 50%.

As the corporate marketing vice president of cloud and corporate solutions of the company of Takeshi Numoto wrote in the blog of Microsoft, virtual machines of the F and DV2 series fell in price by 11% and 15% respectively. Solutions of the initial A1 and A2 Basic level began to cost half less, than before.

As notes the VentureBeat edition, this step did not become unprecedented for Microsoft. Several years before company management declared the aspiration to maintain price competitiveness of Azure in fight against Amazon Web Services (AWS). In January, 2016 the prices of Azure virtual machines were reduced.

The prices of Azure virtual machines were reduced for value up to 50%

At this Microsoft fights against AWS and other competitors not only by means of discounts. The software corporation develops new infrastructure of cloud data centers and at the beginning of October, 2016 added to it several new features. Among them - Storage Service Encryption technology for the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) service providing data backup in cloud infrastructure of Microsoft. Innovation allows to transfer securely local data to the cloud storage, using possibilities of enciphering.

Besides, the clients of Microsoft using the Windows Server operating system according to the license Software Assurance got access to the initiative of Microsoft Azure Hybrid Use Benefit allowing to transfer Windows Server workloads to a cloud of Azure and to achieve significant savings (can reach 41%, declare in the company) at expansion of data center in cloud infrastructure.^[2]

Reduction of prices of Azure in response to actions of Amazon

In the middle of January, 2016 Microsoft announced reduction of prices of Azure for corporate users in response to actions of Amazon which provided several days the new tariff plan allowing to save to clients of Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier.

As reported in the official blog Azure, in February, 2016 the cost of the second generation of Azure virtual machines of popular series D which are based on Haswell processors Intel Xeon E5 will be reduced by 10–13% and 14–17% for users of Windows and Linux respectively. More detailed price list is going to be published later.

The cost of Azure virtual machines will fall by 17% that will become the response to pricing of Amazon

The senior director on marketing of the products Microsoft Azure Nicole Herskowitz was recognized that the company reduces the prices of the cloud services to save product competitiveness in fight against AWS.

The last in January, 2016 submitted the new scheme of payment of cloud services under the name Scheduled Reserved Instances. It is expected those who start the cloud applicaions from time to time — in certain hours within a day or days of month. It can be the computer risk analysis made by financial company on  the working days or intensive 3D - rendering of a computer-generated imagery at night.

The subscription of Scheduled Reserved Instances allowing to reserve computing resources of Elastic Compute Cloud for the term of 1 or 3 years provides economy for 5-10% in comparison with the cost of the virtual machines provided on demand report in Amazon.

As notes the Fortune edition, reduction in cost of Azure was expected, considering that else in 2014 the vice president of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie promised that in fight against large competitors the company will use pricing, comparable or more profitable to the clients.^[3]

Discounts were always the popular instrument of involvement of users for cloud providers. In December, 2015 owners of the corporate license Microsoft Enterprise Agreement had an opportunity to save 63% at advance payment for use of a certain Azure virtual machine for a period of 12 months.^[4]

2014: Reduction of prices of Azure services

On September 29, 2014 the press service of Microsoft announced decrease in quotations on a large number of Microsoft Azure services. Reduction of prices affected infrastructure services (including, on data transmission and VM with SQL Server) and the services focused on developers.

The complete list of the prices operating since September 25, 2014:

2009: Start of service and declaration of the prices

Quotations on Windows Azure became known in the summer of 2009. Microsoft began to take $0.12 in each hour of calculations, $0.15 for each transferred GB of data and on $0.01 for each 10 thousand transactions of reading - data writings.

The hosting of a SQL database of Azure Web Edition with a capacity no more than 1 GB costs $10 a month. The database for the SQL Azure Business Edition enterprises with a capacity up to 10 GB will cost $100 a month, and 100 thousand messages of.NET Services - $0.15.

The cost of Windows Azure is comparable to the cost of the competing cloud platforms - for example, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Force.com.

Notes