Book Image

Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By : Riccardo Becker
Book Image

Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By: Riccardo Becker

Overview of this book

Leverage different Windows Azure components together with your existing Microsoft .NET skills to fully take advantage of the power of Windows Azure. Use this book to start small and end big by creating and using storage, cloud services, sql databases, networking, caching and other innovative technology to realize your first top-class Windows Azure service! "Windows Azure for Start-ups" is an incremental guide that will take you from the essentials of the Windows Azure platform up to the realization of your own cloud services running on the platform. You will learn how to apply different technologies of the Windows Azure platform with the help of examples all focusing on one single fictitious start-up scenario. This book is centred around a fictitious company called Geotopia that wants to build a brand new social network by using the Windows Azure platform. It will take the reader from the theory and rationale behind Windows Azure right to building services and coding C#. The books starts by outlining the concepts of Windows Azure. It then demonstrates how to set up a development environment and how to build your application by using different storage mechanisms, applying different features from the Windows Azure platform and ending with the newest features explained from the latest release. Windows Azure for Startups will help you take full advantage of the Windows Azure platform and bring your new service online as quickly as possible.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Windows Azure Programming Patterns for Start-ups
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Basic billing details


In this section, we will learn the basics of the billing model of Windows Azure. We will see that not everything is billed in the same way and that there are differences between the features of the platform.

Compute

We are charged for the compute hours when our application is deployed on Azure. The hours are calculated in clock hours, for example, from 10:00 pm till 10:59 pm. Keep in mind that we are billed for the hours our services are deployed and not for the hours our services are running. Suspended cloud services still appear on the bill.

Don't assume we are only billed for the running hours, because a lot of my colleagues were unhappily surprised by a bill even when their web role instances were in suspended mode. Remember that even when our application is not running, it is still deployed and Microsoft has to create a virtual machine for the designated role. It is always a good practice to make sure our roles are undeployed if we do not need them. This can reduce...