If you wonder how analytics are calculated in windows azure, bellow is a good indicator. Keep this in mind when you’ll have to pay for all this usage.

When the number of VM hours is calculated, both the staging and deployment usage is taken into consideration. If you have a worker role and a web role, both in staging and deployment, then you will generate 4 VMs per clock hour (2  x 2 x 1). 

If you suspend your staging deployment, then those VMs are still in use and those values are still accruing to your VM hour analytics reporting.  That’s because suspending a role simply stops execution of the IIS instance, but does not unload the underlying VM.  You will need to actually delete the roles to avoid having those VM hours reported in the analytics.

It is a common question these days whether to go “cloud” or stay on premises. One of the reasons is the price. To answer this question we use a little spreadsheet that calculates the approximate pricing between Amazon services and on premises custom solution. Of course, there are some assumptions made and the formula is not perfect. However, works for us and probably somebody will find it useful as well.

The scenario in the spreadsheet is for a company wanting to process lots of files (eg. pdf, images). Green cells is input data. Other cells is calculated data. The document is stored using google docs. You can access it here and save a copy in excel if you want to play with the numbers.

Feel free to email me for any feedback, suggestions.