Free from today until its official launch in November, Azure's still-in-beta services range from a hosted .Net platform to an online version of the .

At its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on Tuesday, Microsoft : a consumption model, a subscription model for partner resellers, and an option for volume-license customers such as large enterprises.

The first "pay-as-you-go" model aimed at small developers attracted the most attention, though, because the pricing was closely comparable to services offered Amazon.com, Salesforce.com's Force.com and Google Inc.'s Google App Engine.

Microsoft is charging 12 cents per CPU/hour, 15 cents per gigabyte of data per month, and 10 cents per 10,000 transactions for storage purposes.

While to be cheaper than Amazon.com's price for hosted Windows and more expensive than a Linux instance, called