Earlier this week Microsoft announced that its Cloud operating system would be launched in November 2009 at the Professional Developer Conference 2009. This puts the official availability deadline of Windows Azure at one year after the platform was introduced at PDC08. The Redmond company explained that it would initially target a total of 21 markets at launch and that it would go live with special offerings in local currencies for customers in: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the United States.

“Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 and we hope you will continue building on the Community Technology Preview (CTP) at no cost today. Upon commercial availability we will offer Windows Azure through a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume,” revealed a member of the Windows Azure team.

It will only be in March 2010 that Microsoft will go ahead with the second wave of the Windows Azure launch. Customers in an additional 16 countries around the world will be able to access Microsoft's Cloud platform come March of next year: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, and Taiwan. The Redmond company failed to reveal when it planned to unveil Windows Azure availability in additional countries, and just promised that future launches would come as “quickly as possible.”

“Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed so while developing and testing your application you may want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Windows Azure storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. Storage is also metered in terms of storage transactions used to add, update, read and delete storage data. These are billed at a rate of $0.01 for 10,000 (10k) transaction requests. Bandwidth is charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Windows Azure platform services via the internet in a given 30-day period,” the Windows team member added.