Microsoft Azure Pricing - What constitutes outbound traffic?

4
votes

According the the Azure pricing website:

All inbound data sent to Windows Azure is free. Outbound data is charged based on the total amount of data moving out of the Windows Azure datacenters via the Internet in a given billing cycle. Data transfers between Windows Azure services located within the same datacenter are not subject to any charge. The first 5 GB of outbound data transfers per billing month are also free.

So I have the following questions:

  1. If I use Azure to host a website with a SQL Azure DB that is 100MB in size, if no one ever hits my site (and thus no outbound traffic), would my only cost be the $5/mo. for the 100MB DB?

  2. When my MVC 4 app requests data from the SQL Azure DB, and the DB returns data, does that count as "outbound data"? Or is outbound data only data that goes from my website to whatever client is accessing the website?

1
azure

1 Answers

6
votes
  1. You would be charged for the database and any compute time (e.g. Cloud Services or one of the non-free Windows Azure Web Sites.
  2. No - outbound data would be the data included as part of the web response (not the data transferred between the app and database). Just be sure the app and DB are in the same datacenter.