Windows http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>Azure, the Internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, is confirmed to be commercial today during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 . Microsoft guarantees 99.95% up time for web apps and 99.9% uptime for Storage on Windows http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>Azure. Windows http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>Azure, SQL http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>Azure and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developer Conference 2009. Till then, the CTP is free for all.

I think pricing is reasonable, Official blog says:

Windows http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>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 http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>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 http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>Azure platform services via the internet in a given 30-day period.

Pricing:

Compute:

$0.12 / hour

Storage:

$0.15 / GB stored

Storage Transactions:

$0.01 / 10K

SQL http://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/’ target=’_blank’>Azure:

Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99

Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:

Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB