How are Azure costs calculated?

Microsoft Azure has two methods for calculating the monthly service charges – consumption pricing or commitment (subscription) pricing. Because Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric are three independent services, each is priced separately and with its own rates. The charges may seem like nickel-and-diming as they are broken out by the different features of each service, but having the charges broken out allows us to utilize and pay for only what we use.

In addition to production-scale pricing plans, Microsoft also offers limited-use plans suitable for development and conference room pilot efforts. For the most current rates and offers, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/. We're not going to list the base rates here, as they are likely to change over time. Instead, we'll look at how the charges are applied to each service in the next section.

Cloud services such as Amazon EC2 bill in a manner close to what Microsoft does, yet offer a little...