A few months ago I played with Azure, experimented with all the storage options (table, queue, blobs) web and worker roles, made things interact and generally got to know what was possible, not possible and how to do things. It was interesting, i gave a few presentations to the company I was contracted to at the time but in the end it was all just exploration, they were never going to take it up (they own lots of their own hardware, i mean Lots, and besides in my view there are issues with going to Azure as a solution for that enterprise problem), also I didn't see any use for it in my own personal projects.
I had a MSDN account which at the time entitled me to 750 compute hours a month (a compute hour is just a measure of how long your roles have been deployed in the cloud), and was careful with my deployments, always take test deployments down to minimise the total compute hours.
Anyway two problems:
1st. I didnt check my subscription(why would i?) it turned out i had the basic "starter" subscription (50 free compute hours) not the MSDN package (750 free hours).
2nd. I did a demo and someone wanted to use it afterwards so i left it up (one web role and one worker role) and then forgot about it... opps. To add to my woes my hotmail account is not my primary email account so the billing was not coming to me, i only just found it when I happened to be on hotmail.
To cut a long story short I got charged £50 + £120 + £120 for the honour of having my dummy website sat doing nothing on the azure application fabric... I;ve since talked to Microsoft and cancelled my azure account, i see no need for it, I'm not going to use it any time soon, and wanted to make double sure all my web instances were gone. but after talking to them i have got last months money back, better than nothing but still... i guess it was my fault for not checking my package, my running instances and my email, stupid boy.
Morale of the story to all you perspective Azure developers out there, check your subscriptions, and always take down your test deployments, always.
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