Azure

Windows Azure Cloud Computing Service: Release Date And Pricing Details

July 15, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Microsoft has shared details on how much it will charge companies that want to use its Windows Azure cloud computing service – which will compete with the likes of Amazon WS and Force.com – when it is released in final form later this Fall. Redmond announced a couple of plans, including one that charges purely on consumption and another that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a 6-month commitment.

The cloud operating system isn’t launching in final form until Microsoft’s upcoming Professional Developer Conference (November 2009), but an executive apparently had informed CNET that the pricing announcement would be made at this week’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which is taking place in New Orleans.

Microsoft said it will charge 12 cents per hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte. The discount plan comes in two forms and offers a 15 percent to 30 percent discount off the consumption charges. It requires a six-month commitment, with overage charges billed at the regular rates. After six months, the pricing reverts to the standard Azure rates.

Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, charging $9.99 for the basic Web edition, including up to a 1GB relational database and $99.99 for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database.

The software maker said it would promise 99.95 percent reliability for its compute and connectivity and 99.9 percent for role instance and storage. Ultimately, though, Ray Ozzie has said that trust will play a big role in which company businesses are willing to choose to host their applications.

Microsoft Launches Cloud Platform, Dubs It Windows Azure

October 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Ray Ozzie opened the Microsoft PDC ’08 this morning with a keynote speech, announcing Windows Azure, Microsoft’s “Windows in the cloud” (press release here). It is a new service based operating environment, which he described as a massive highly scalable service platform. What is being released today is just a fraction of what it will become. It will be Microsoft’s highest scalable system enabling people and companies to create services on the Web.

Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers operating within Microsoft’s global datacenter network. This provides developers with the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios.

Mary-Jo Foley offers a ‘guide for the perplexed‘.

Microsoft did not disclose pricing, licensing or timing details for Azure. The company is planning to release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of Azure to PDC attendees on October 27.

More details later.

Azure Uses Intel Virtualization Extensions To Counter Malware

July 22, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

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Paul Royal, principal researcher at Damballa, has developed a new tool called Azure, which takes advantage of the virtualization extensions in Intel‘s chips to evade the virtual machine and sandbox checks malware authors often include in their ‘work’. Because the extensions exist at the hardware level, below the level of the host OS, the malware doesn’t have the ability to detect Azure, allowing researchers to analyze its behavior unimpeded.

“The whole point is to get out of the guest OS so the malware can’t detect you and attack,” said Royal. “Intel VT doesn’t have the weakness of in-guest approaches because it’s completely external. Others use system emulators, but to get everything exactly right in terms of emulation can be tricky.”

Royal plans to release the source code for Azure at the upcoming Black Hat conference in Las Vegas and will make the tool available for download, as well. Royal said he is still working on features that he plans to add to a future version of Azure, including a precision automated unpacker and a system call tracer.

Intel’s virtualization technology (VT) is a set of extensions added to some of the company’s chipsets that help implement virtualization on the hardware, rather than the software level. VT is designed to help enterprises make better use of their hardware resources and save energy.

[Source: SearchSecurity]