Microsoft has just announced the public release of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services in direct competition with Amazon AWS. The new service which has been in limited preview since last year is now available coupled with a simultaneous price drop ranging from 21 to 33 percent. The new Infrastructure as a Service offering will offer a virtualized Windows and Linux environment on the Azure platform.
In its blog post announcing the new release, Bill hilf, the General Manager from Windows Azure Team said, “We’ll never tell you that a Microsoft app inside your virtual machine is “up the stack” and we don’t support it—we’ll support it and make sure you’re successful. And we’ll back it with monthly SLAs that are among the industry’s highest.” He also quoted some feedback and described anecdotes from customers like Digital Air Strike and Telenor. He quoted Telenor for example, which reduced their setup time for Sharepoint from 3 months to two weeks, saving not only time, but money with a 70% cost reduction on their test environment. Additonally Azure is reported to have more than 200, 000 customers which use a hybrid approach to deploy their applications in the cloud.
Among the applications that have just made it to the list of instances which are pre-validated by Microsoft include SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk Server, and Dynamics NAV. Some new high memory instances have also been added for those cases which have to work on peak workloads.
All these goodies come with a guarantee that Microsoft will always match up to any price drop that Amazon AWS goes through in the future. This commmitment on behalf of Microsoft makes sure that it will be able to make a sizeable dent into Amazon’s market share.
