By Samara Lynn Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is Redmond's cloud computing platform. In addition to its name change, the service has also recently expanded. Essentially, whatever you can do with traditional, on-premise Microsoft software—run SharePoint, manage SQL databases, deploy Active Directory—you can do within Azure. With its new capabilities Azure offers easier creation of hybrid clouds and more robust disaster recovery options for businesses.
Azure is a polished, complex service, yet it's one that's also very easy to get up and running for those who have worked with Windows systems. In fact, it's Azure's general ease of use and excellent wizard-driven setup that cause it to stand out among the competition as our Editors' Choice for small business cloud services. Rackspace in particular trails Microsoft in this regard, relying on the user to search for solutions among text-based FAQs and knowledgebase entries. Furthermore, Azure delivers superb performance, better than either Rackspace or Amazon EC2. Azure may cost more than the competition, but you get your money's worth with the polished interface, peppy performance, and close integration with Microsoft's other services.
Signup and Pricing
Microsoft is currently offering a 30-day free trial of Azure. You receive a $200 credit to spend on Azure services during the trial. You can create and try out any combination of Azure resources you like. You will need to enter a credit card, though you won't billed during the period of the trial. Using my Live account, I was signed up and ready to use Azure in seconds.
One of the complaints sometimes leveled against Azure is its expense. To evaluate, I compared building and running a small-business Windows 2012 server across the three major cloud hosting providers: Microsoft, Amazon, and Rackspace. These hosted platforms offer so many different services and subscription tiers that we had to narrow down comparisons to a specific deployment scenario—running a virtual Windows server for a small-to-midsize business.
As with Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, Azure's server instance subscriptions are rated per minute and billed on a monthly basis. Azure is a little more expensive overall than EC2 for the small business subscriptions I looked at, and it's definitely more expensive than Rackspace after you factor in what is included with each service's subscription.
For example, a Windows 2012 server in Azure with one virtual-core processor, 1.75GB of RAM, and basic support is $0.075 per hour—about $56 per month. Azure requires you to pay extra for storage, however, including its optional basic "blob block" of locally redundant storage—which is simply storage for large files that get replicated for high-availability within a single geographic region.
With EC2, a single virtual-core processor, general-purpose Windows 2012 server with 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of data storage, and a basic support subscription costs $54.90 monthly—similar specs, for just a little less.
Rackspace offers the most bang for your buck: For $73 per month, you get a Windows Server 2012 instance configured with 2 CPUs, 2GB RAM, and 20GB of SSD storage (that is just flat storage though, meaning you have to download and upload data to change it, you can't access it or work with that data on your server.) That price includes a generous support plan complete with 24/7 support from cloud engineers, making it attractive for those who are completely new to hosted services. Neither Azure nor Amazon provide much free support outside of access to community forums.
Hosted Server Subscription Pricing
Hosted Server Support Pricing
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