One of the keys to Microsoft’s strategy to make Azure a clear choice for customers of every size is the idea that you get massive scalability to meet demands, but only have to pay for capacity that you’re actually using at any given point in time. Until today, that statement has always come with its own asterisk because the reality was that you only pay for the capacity of which you use any portion of an hour. That might seem insignificant, but for a customer running thousands of VMs, the difference value received by 61 minutes of runtime and 120 minutes of runtime can be huge and the cost has been the same. Microsoft announced today in this blog post and through several newsletter channels that effective today Azure will be billed by the minute – effectively making 61 minutes of runtime cost far less than the same time on competitors’ products. These changes along with Microsoft’s commitment to maintaining competitive pricing make implementing solutions on Azure as attractive to the CFO as it is to the CIO.
