Skip to main content

Windows Azure announcement: Per Minute Billing and No Charge for Stopped VMs

I think the Windows Azure team never sleeps because they keep releasing new features at an incredible pace.

Last week Scott Guthrie announced some great enhancements to Windows Azure:

  • Dev/Test in the Cloud: MSDN Use Rights, Unbeatable MSDN Discount Rates, MSDN Monetary Credits
  • BizTalk Services: Great new service for Windows Azure that enables EDI and EAI integration in the cloud
  • Per-Minute Billing and No Charge for Stopped VMs: Now only get charged for the exact minutes of compute you use, no compute charges for stopped VMs
  • SSL Support with Web Sites: Support for both IP Address and SNI based SSL bindings on custom web-site domains
  • Active Directory: Updated directory sync utility, ability to manage Office 365 directory tenants from Windows Azure Management Portal
  • Free Trial: More flexible Free Trial offer

The one feature I liked the most(and my credit card will agree) is the Per Minute Billing and No Charge for Stopped VM's.  Before when you stopped a VM(without deleting it), Microsoft continued to bill you for the VM. With this update, when you stop a VM you are  longer charge you any compute time for it while it is stopped. And all deployment data and configuration is safely stored.

The other one is that the pricing model changed from per-hour to per-minute. Before when you ran a VM for 6 minutes, you would still be charged for a full hour of usage.  With the new pricing model, you only pay for the actual 6 minutes of compute usage.

Keep going guys!

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.