OakLeaf Systems: Windows Azure MSDN Benefit Subscriptions will be Renewed and Renamed as of Next Billing Cycle

Sunday, January 01, 2012

Windows Azure MSDN Benefit Subscriptions will be Renewed and Renamed as of Next Billing Cycle

On 12/30/2011, I received the following email from MSFT *Azure (billing@microsoft.com) regarding my free Windows Azure subscription from my MSDN Premium subscription benefit:

Notice that the message does not indicate whether the default spending limit will be in effect when the subscription renews. See Jim O’Neil’s Windows Azure Trial Account Spending Limit post of 12/28/2011 for more details about the spending limit.

Following are the details of the original subscription as of 1/1/2012:

Notice that the original Name of the subscription is OakLeaf Azure MSDN Subscription.

Following are the billing details for this subscription from the Windows Azure Account Center on 1/1/2012:

Notice that the subscription name has been changed to Azure Free Trial without notification in the message. I do not appreciate the billing system making gratuitous changes to my account. I’m surprised that Microsoft’s Trademark and Tradename police didn’t catch the name’s missing Windows prefix.

Note: The large number of storage transactions and large storage size are the result of performance counter diagnostics being retrieved on 15-minute intervals. The 3.52 GB of Data Transfer Out is the partial result of retrieving diagnostics records for storage on my development machine. The 15 million or more records (5+ GB) will be uploaded to Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure clusters for analysis with MapReduce and used to test SQL Azure Federations.

I’m waiting for a similar message about my free OakLeaf Cloud Essentials subscription. Hopefully, it won’t be renamed to Azure Free Trial.

I’ll update this post on 1/7/2012 and 2/7/2012 when I learn if the spending limit caused my SampleWebCloudService project instances to shut down.