Azure pricing spreadsheet sample: pricing.xlsx
I delivered a session at Dev Connections (www.devconnections.com) last week called Pricing the Cloud. The session used a fictional sample to estimate various usage in Azure to plug in to the pricing tools online. The pricing tools don’t help you with application specific estimates that you plug in to the tools, such as how much bandwidth will you use, how much table storage, etc. This session walked you through how to estimate these things in general, and my link above shows you a pricing worksheet that can be used to show you the details that go into these estimates. Every company worksheet could look different, as your tables, media use, services and so forth will vary. Hope this helps to get you moving in the right direction!
In case you missed it, here is the abstract for my session.
VWA08: Pricing the Cloud
Michele Leroux Bustamante
By leveraging services in the cloud, startups can easily bootstrap their operations in a cost effective manner. Existing systems can also leverage the cloud in its entirety or for specific aspects of the system to reduce infrastructure management costs and to support potentially scale-out requirements as system usage increases. Windows Azure platform offers many services from application hosting, data storage and content delivery via Windows Azure, to relational data storage with SQL Azure, to infrastructure services related to messaging, caching and security with Windows Azure AppFabric. Pricing each of these services to estimate your costs requires some thoughtfulness around how you will use each service within your architecture, and some predictions about the number of users, payload traffic and number of transactions. How then can you estimate our costs, or price your own offering to customers when there are so many variables? Pricing is not a perfect science and each business will have its own level of tolerance for cost absorption vs. costs to be deferred to customers. In this session we will break down the pricing model of the cloud, look at ways to quantify your service using various architectural examples, and look at ways you can track usage, validate costs and ultimately collect your costs across the various Windows Azure platform properties to gain perspective on what you need to charge your customers for those services.
Updated 11/8/2011