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Our company has until bought a lot VS Pro/Premium and Ultimate Licenses, and each includes a free Azure Account. At the Azure Info day we have been told the best way would be to bundle them into one big account (there is just too much overhead if every developer here would register that account on his own).

Do you know how to do this ? Is there a special account manager we should contact ?

Thanks in advance, Mathias Held

Mathias Held
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Each MSDN subscription has its own Windows Azure subscription with a given number of resources allocated per month. Those resources cannot be combined. For example, if you have 10 developers with MSDN Ultimate subscriptions, each with 1,500 Compute hours per month, you can NOT combine them into a single account with 15,000 Compute hours.

Regarding too much overhead: The task of enabling Windows Azure resources is incredibly simple. In fact, if you go to the new Windows Azure portal and sign in with the Live ID associated with your MSDN account, the portal will recognize that there's an associated Windows Azure subscription.

If your concern is that an individual dev won't have enough Windows Azure Compute resources monthly, this is more of an educational issue. At 1,500 monthly Compute hours (and Extra Small instances running at 1/3 Compute Hour), you have enough resources to run 2 Small instances 24x7 (or 6 Extra Small). The prudent advice is to delete all deployments when not in use (e.g. after work hours or between test deployments). This will give you much more breathing room and let you run much larger VM sizes without risk of going over allotted resources.

David Makogon
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    It's also important to state that the MSDN Azure benefits are for developement only, not production. – CSharpRocks Dec 19 '11 at 18:24
  • Hi David, thanks for the answer. I logged in but it did not recognize that I have a free account already. Activating manually needs either Credit Card (which we don't have) or call to MS Service. This means 100 people here would start to do that (they won't) and we leave a lot of our accounts unused. We want to use the bundled account for our Continuous Integration, mainly for load & performancetest, and it would be much easier to work with one account for that purpose instead of 50 small ones getting 50 bills (if we exceed the limits). Explain that our Finance :) – Mathias Held Dec 21 '11 at 07:32
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    Yes, it requires a credit card, for overage (a required step). But you can now set a $0 cap, which simply cuts off use instead of billing. This is very streamlined compared to the original signup workflow. Unfortunately there's no way to combine accounts. But think about this: with 1,500 hours, you could run a load-test with 8 Medium instances hosting your app and 2 XL generating load. Run this for an hour, then shut it down, and it consumes 32 Compute Hours. You could re-run that load-test 42 times monthly and still not exceed 1,500 hours. Just an example... – David Makogon Dec 21 '11 at 12:22
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    Going further: If you subscribe to a Testing-as-a-Service product like LoadStorm to generate your load (which has load generators in both EC2 and Windows Azure), the CI / load-test example above would consume 16 Compute Hours per clock hour, with enough Compute Hours to push over 80 builds up for an hour apiece. Assuming 20 work-days per month, that's 4 pushes daily. And that's with 8 Mediums (a pretty large setup). Scale that down to 4 Mediums, and you have 8 pushes daily. 4 Smalls? 16 pushes daily. – David Makogon Dec 21 '11 at 12:25