At its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on Tuesday, Microsoft made an announcement about the pricing for its Windows Azure cloud computing services, which is due for launch in its final form in fall this year.

Announcing its 'pay-as-you-go' basis of pricing for Azure services, Microsoft said that a number of plans will be made available - while one will charge solely on consumption basis, another will offer discounted rates for those agreeing to a six-month commitment.

The charges for the purely consumption basis plan would be 12 cents an hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage, and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. In addition, between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte would be charged for network bandwidth.

Meanwhile, the discount plan - called the "development accelerator" - would come in two forms, offering a discount of between 15 percent and 30 percent on the consumption charges. The plan can be availed only with a six-month commitment, and at the end of the stipulated six-month period, the pricing will revert to the set Azure rates.

Moreover, Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, saying that $9.99 will be charged for the basic Web edition - which would include up to a 1GB relational database - and $99.99 will be charged for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database.