Windows Azure is an ecosystem of services that can be leveraged to build reliable solutions.
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How many times do we have to scramble to assemble a decent
Dev & Test environment?
When I think back to my past lives, I can attest that it’s been a challenging mess. I used to run around to various departments in order to find available machines, software installation disks, licenses and IT resources to help me put everything together.
Taking shortcuts usually meant cutting back on the Dev & Test infrastructure. Consequently, I rarely had environments that mirrored the actual production environment. Products would make their way through development and quality assurance, but I rarely had a clear picture of how it would react to the production environment. Deploying to production usually resulted in being asked to come in on weekends because the outcome was completely unpredictable and that time needed to be scheduled in order to rollback.
Just thinking about all this sends chills down my spine!
Earlier this month Amazon cut prices on Virtual Machines and I compared both Windows Azure and Amazon yearly pricing for Windows Virtual Machines. At the time Microsoft had not made any announcements about changes to their pricing and I was trying to imagine how they would react.
Today Microsoft announced a 33% price reduction for Cloud Services web and worker roles.
Based on the following announcements (copied directly from the announcement email), I have recalculated the yearly costs for hosting Cloud Services with 33% discounted prices and compared the new prices with Amazons’ new prices. Furthermore, I recalculated the yearly pricing for Virtual Machines with the 21% discounted prices in order to compare with Amazons’ new prices.
Alexandre Brisebois ☁ 