Microsoft has upped the ante in the public cloud price wars once more by scrapping the per hour billing model for its Azure platform.
The software giant announced the move at its TechEd Conference in New Orleans, where it confirmed that users will now be charged on a per minute basis for using Azure services.
During the event's opening keynote, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Microsoft server and tools business division, said the change means users will no longer be billed for services they have not used.
Starting today, when you stop a VM it stops and you no longer get billed.
"Previously with Windows Azure, if you spun up a VM and ran it for 36 minutes, and then shut it down, you'd still be billed for the entire hour," he explained. "So, [now] if you spin it up for 36 minutes and shut it down you only pay for the 36-minute equivalent of that rate."
The company is also planning to stop charging users for virtual machines they have stopped running on Azure, he confirmed.
"Prior to today, if you stopped a VM, we... still charged you for an hourly rate unless you explicitly deleted it," he said.
"Starting today, when you stop a VM it stops and you no longer get billed. But, you can still go ahead and recreate it and start on it in order to boot it back up and run it again."
Both changes will help save users a "tremendous amount of money" and, perhaps, make them more willing to use the Azure for test and development purposes, said Guthrie.
Further to this, the company announced that members of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) can now take advantage of a subscription offer that gives them up to $150 a month of Azure credits.
"You can use these credits on any Windows Azure resource for dev test and the great thing is they're per-subscriber, so each member of your developer team can have their own test environment within Windows Azure," Guthrie explained.
The credits will be renewed each month, and Microsoft has updated the Azure management console to make it easier for developers to track the number they have used.
The announcements come hot on the heels of Microsoft's vow back in April to match the price of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) compute, storage and bandwidth services.
