14 DAY TRIAL // Customers looking to get started with Windows Azure need to take a look at an excellent resource put together by Microsoft.
I’m talking about the Windows Azure Platform Offer Comparison Table, which is used to summarize all the offers available around Microsoft’s Cloud platform.
Not only this, but customers can easily compare the benefits of various Windows Azure offers and easily calculate how much it will cost them, provided that they have some usage statistics at hand.
Windows Azure Platform Offer Comparison Table offers details on: Introductory Special, Cloud Essentials, MSDN Professional, MSDN Premium, MSDN Ultimate, Development Accelerator Core, SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core, Development Accelerator Extended and Consumption.
The software giant offers information on all elements associated with a specific offer, including Compute, Storage, Storage transactions, Content Delivery Network, Virtual Network, web database, business database, Access Control transactions, Service Bus connections and data transfers.
As far as I’m concerned, the best offer for developers to get started with Microsoft’s Cloud is the Free Trial Introductory Special.
As the official label of the promotion notes, the Trial Introductory Special is available at no cost, as long as devs respect certain usage limitations. They will be billed however if usage surpasses the amounts set by the software giant at standard rates.
There’s one drawback for this offer however, the “introductory special will end on September 30, 2011 and all usage will then be charged at the standard rates,” the company said.
Another excellent offer is Cloud Essentials, also available free of charge. But MSDN Professional, MSDN Premium and MSDN Ultimate will also allow subscribers to use Windows Azure for free.
Customers can then visit Microsoft’s Offers page for Windows Azure and get a plethora of additional detail on the platform, and even buy a subscription in order to start leveraging the Cloud.