On April 4th 2013 Amazon announced a price reduction of up to 26% on Windows On-Demand instances.
The Register wrote about the price cuts on April 5th 2013 and their article got me thinking.
A few weeks ago, I was asked about how the Windows Azure Virtual Machine pricing stacks up against AWS. Frankly, I wasn’t able to answer the question. Consequently, I decided to find out by comparing the cost of
a Virtual Machine instance for the period of 1 year .
The following prices are from April 2013
| VM Size | Windows Azure | Amazon Web Services | Difference |  |
| Small | $700.80 / yr | $797.16 / yr | $96.36 | |
| Medium | $1401.60 / yr | $1594.32 / yr | $192.72 | |
| Large | $2803.20 / yr | $3188.64 / yr | $385.44 | |
| XL | $5606.40 / yr | $6377.28 / yr | $770.88 |
From this comparison, its quite clear that Windows Azure is still the cheapest place to host Windows based solutions. The prices used for this comparison are preview prices which are 33% off. Following this comparison, I wonder if Microsoft will raise prices when the Virtual Machine offering will graduate from it’s preview.
For those who are curious, the following is a comparison of the offerings using the announced pricing for the Windows Azure Virtual Machines once they graduate from preview.
| VM Size | Windows Azure | Amazon Web Services | Difference | |
| Small | $1051.20 / yr | $797.16 / yr | $254.04 | |
| Medium | $2102.40 / yr | $1594.32 / yr | $508.08 | |
| Large | $4204.80 / yr | $3188.64 / yr | $1016.16 | |
| XL | $8409.60 / yr | $6377.28 / yr | $2032.32 |
For reference purposes, here is the hourly pricing for Virtual Machines Preview in Windows Azure
- Small = $0.08 / hr — (1.6GHz CPU, 1.75GB RAM)
- Medium = $0.16 / hr — (2 x 1.6GHz CPU, 3.5GB RAM)
- Large = $0.032 / hr — (4 x 1.6GHz CPU, 7GB RAM)
- Extra Large = $0.64 / hr — (8 x 1.6GHz CPU, 14GB RAM)
For reference purposes, here is the hourly pricing for Virtual Machines in AWS
- Small = $0.091 / hr
- Medium = $0.182 / hr
- Large = $0.364 / hr
- Extra Large = $0.728 / hr
Alexandre Brisebois ☁ 
How does the licensing work on windows azure.If we have MSDN bundle license can we use the same.
Please throw some light on this.
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To answer your question, the current situation is:
Where the Software Can be Installed and Run
The licensed user can install and use the software on any number of devices. The software can be installed and used on your devices at work, at home, at school, and even on devices at a customer’s office or on dedicated hardware hosted by a 3rd party. However, the software is not licensed for use on 3rd party shared servers (“cloud” environments) or in production environments.
Which is from page 12 of Visual Studio 2012 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper – January-2013, downloadable here : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13350
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