Today, at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform including service level agreements and support programs.

The Windows Azure platform, which includes a cloud services operating system – Windows Azure, a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), as well as connectivity and interoperability services with .NET Services. Today, we announced a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.  Here is a summary of that pricing:

Windows Azure:

• Compute @ $0.12 / hour
• Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
• Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

• Web Edition – Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
• Business Edition – Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:

• Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB.

Additionally, the Windows Azure blog outlined an enterprise-class guarantee backed by a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability:

“For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action. For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.”

Today, we also announced that Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developers Conference 2009, which goes on between November 17 and 19, 2009.