Big announcement day for Windows Azure – details on ScottGu’s blog.

So, even though, I’ve had some difficulty avoiding charges when trying out Azure features in the past (blog reference), I signed up for a new free trial account.  After signing up, I was ready to go for it on the new features – specifically VMs and WebSites.  Unfortunately, by default those features weren’t available in the new portal (shown below).

So, after reading around a bit on the Azure portal, I found that I would have to go to Windows Azure>Account>Preview Features to enable access to the newly announced features.  First, I clicked on the ‘Web Sites’ feature and was presented with the dialog box shown below.  I was happy to see the word ‘FREE’ as part of the dialog.

Next I clicked on the ‘Try it now’ button for VMs and got the dialog box shown below.  Hmm… ‘charges may be included’ — what charges?  how much?  I can’t seem to find any info on that, so I am not clicking.  Darn, this is a feature that I really wanted to try out.

To be complete, I then clicked on the ‘Try it out’ button for the media services.  Did I see the comforting word ‘FREE’? Nope – as shown below.

Buyer beware!  I would really like to try out these new features, but will not try them if I have to pay to try.  I would be interested to hear about your experience with these new features, feel free to add comments to this blog post with your experiences.