14 DAY TRIAL // A new service from Microsoft designed to boost the performance of Cloud Application has hit the RTW (release to web) milestone. With the release deadline announced at MIX2011, Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service RTW can be used for production projects, and at least for the time being and the next few months, it doesn’t cost anything.
The software giant explained that it will not be charging for the service for billing periods for the next three months. This means that customers can leverage Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service free of charge until August 1, 2011.
The move is designed to allow Windows Azure customers to evaluate the new Cloud offer, and get an idea of the caching needs of the Cloud applications.
“The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage or database,” a member of the AppFabric team stated.
At this point in time, customers can choose between no less than 6 different cache size options. Depending on their needs they go as low as 128MB or as high as 4GB for caching to speed up their apps.
Microsoft also announced the prices that it will be charging for the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service for usage starting with August 2011.
According to the company 128 MB cache will cost $45.00/month; 256 MB cache will go for $55.00/month; 512 MB cache for $75.00/month; 1 GB cache for $110.00month; 2 GB cache for $180.00/month; and 4 GB cache for $325.00/month.
“The service is billed on a monthly basis, based on the cache size you sign up for. You can also sign up for more than one cache and use these multiple caches in order to get a total cache size that is different or bigger than the standard cache sizes we provide,” the AppFabric team representative added.