Microsoft has launched its Azure cloud platform in Australia, letting developers deploy applications on the company's datacentres in North American, Europe and in the Asia Pacific.
However, deployments to the closest and fastest datacentre — Asia Pacific — will cost three times as much as the other datacentres.
While pricing is the same for Microsoft's Azure datacentres in Europe and North America, costing A$0.10 per gigabyte in and $0.15 per gigabyte out, deployments to the Asia Pacific datacentre will cost $0.30 and $0.45 respectively for the same service.
Microsoft New Zealand will launch Azure here next week featuring case studies of local early adopters. Computerworld New Zealand has already profiled one such user, TicketDirect, which redeveloped its ticketing system on Azure as part of Microsoft's Technical Adoption Programme. Reseller News has previously detailed the efforts of local partners Intergen and Provoke, who have been trialling Azure to develop or migrate applications.
Azure, released in Australia in conjunction with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 is Microsoft's first entry into the cloud computing and storage market, competing against Amazon's suite of AWS services, as well as Salesforce.com and local hosted datacentres.
The platform was available to trial globally during January this year, but was cut-off to Australian users from 1 February, when it was officially launched across North America, Europe and Singapore. The second wave, launched this week, sees Australian developers welcomed back into the fold and the announcement of a free introductory special that includes limited compute hours and data storage allowances.
Read more on Computerworld.