Windows Azure fails with pricing model.
Microsoft announced the pricing for their Azure services today. On the whole they are pretty close to industry standards with one big exception.
If you deploy an application, rather than charging for compute power directly, you’re being charged for having the deployment active per hour. At $0.12 per hour this means a single application is costing you the same as your own, entire EC2 server with Amazon.
Sure you can have multiple roles in an application package but since upgrading the package takes all those roles offline they really have to be roles working together and not with separate concerns.
Unless I’m really missing something (always a possibility) this will never work for me or my clients. We’ve already begun the migration work to take existing .NET services that were built for Azure and will be migrating them to Ruby for cheaper deployment options.
I can’t really compare SQL services etc just yet but as usual, it looks like the Microsoft option is always going to be far more costly than alternatives. A real pity.