Windows Azure looks like a promising cloud platform. The big unknown right now is the pricing model. Microsoft says that they are still working on that, but it will be competitive. What do you think would make a good pricing model?
Let's hope that Microsoft will take note of what a bunch of programmers want.
Update: Azure Pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx
Essentially, Amazon set a mark with their Services (CloudFront, SimpleDB, possibly also S3 and EC2), and I believe that even though Azure offers a lot more for .net Developers, that's a pricing Microsoft could look at.
But essentially, I think pricing has to be done for Traffic and Database Requests, with no or only a very low monthly fee and setup cost.
Edit: It could also be interesting to see how they place themselves against traditional Web Hosting companies. After all, on a very simplified level, Azure is distributed IIS Hosting.
Azure can go one of two ways:
Simple Pay-as-you-go model, like Amazon has, with tiered pricing for higher usage (more usage = lower per-unit pricing). This is the model I would like to see. It works well for Amazon, the industry gets it, anybody reading the pricing will quickly be able to estimate whether it will cost more or less than their budget, etc.
Complex Service Level Agreements and Black Box Arrangements. They can make this hard. They can make it so that if you're a partner in the US in special program XYZ then you have this price schedule, but if you're a Super-Duper Partner in Ontario then you have another price, and if you're at a fortune 500 company with branches in Maui then you get yet another price, and nobody can figure out what the prices are on their own. This would be a big mistake, and would cost Azure virtually all of its small entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and small-medium business customers. Even if they have Azure Express for Hobbyists and Students, it will still fail compared to option 1.
Here's hoping they do something simple - otherwise I fear Amazon will beat them handily, and/or Google will come along with something free and perhaps ad supported and they'll have a difficult time competing against that.
I hope they go with something simple. Amazon's pricing is simple enough although I'm often confused when cpu cycles are mentioned. Knowing Microsoft they will most likely come up with something complicated with multiple tiers of service levels and pricing.
I'm a .net developer but for some reason I haven't been very excited about Azure. It does not seem to be very straightforward and easy to use. I like Google Apps in that it's simple and I like Amazon in that it's pretty open (you don't need to use a certain technology with Amazon).
The pricing model for the Azure services platform, especially the VMs needs to take into account the idle time of the processor. As long as they do that, I'll be happy. I just don't want to have to be paying for processing I'm not using at all and when I am using it I'm fine with paying for it.
I've been wondering about the same thing. Google has the "cost-leadership" strategy - they can offer a pretty good service that starts at 0 cost, and ramp up if you become popular. Amazon differentiates by offering more plumbing options, but you have to pay for each virtual machine. It'll cost you even if you only have 10 users a month, but you can tweak your machine more.
I suspect MS will compete more directly with Amazon, but charging for services instead of virtual machines. They're not as comfortable as Google with giving things away for free - they have to protect the many, many IIS and SQL Server installations that would disappear if the web install was cheaper. They also have to combat the issue of someone else giving a better SQL Server experience than them - they have to be "The Place" to host your MS-related technologies.
So expect to pay for each service instance (web, storage, sync, whatever) + some charge for usage. Maybe $20 for the service instance, instead of Amazon's $80 (or whatever it is) for each server.