Does Azure Worker Roles get charged $$ when they are Sleeping?

Question

I\'m trying to figure out how to (roughly) calculate some expected costs for some worker roles I\'m thinking about creating.

TLDR;

Answer 1

Worker and Web Roles are charged per hour of deployment so even if doing nothing it is being charged out as you have physically commission the vm to be spun up.

Even if the role is stopped but the deployment hasn't been deleted you will still pay for the instance.

Also note, it is charged for the full hour so if you deploy and take down 10 minutes later you still pay for entire hour. Or if you deploy at 11:55am and delete at 12:15pm you will pay for 2 hours.

From http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/cloud-services/#

If my deployed instance is in the “stopped” state, do I still get billed?

Yes, a stopped instance still occupies the compute resource that powers the instance, and therefore you still get billed. In order to stop billing, you need to delete your deployment.

If my Web or Worker role was deployed for less than an hour, how much do I get billed for?

Cloud services are billed based on the number of clock hours your service was deployed. Any partial clock hour is billed as a full hour if the deployment was longer than five minutes within one clock hour. If your service was deployed for less than an hour, you may get billed for zero, one or two hours depending on when the deployment happened. For example, if you deploy a small Cloud Services instance at 10:50 AM and delete it at 11:10AM, you will be billed for two hours, one hour for usage during 10:50 AM to 11:00 AM and another hour for usage during 11:00 AM and 11:10 AM.

Answer 2

As long as you have deployment in windows azure you are charged. It does not matter whether it is in running state or stopped state. If you shut down roles, then also you will incur cost.

Answer 3

I know this is an old question, but I was doing some Azure pricing research and the accepted answer has a section that is no longer true.

The question "If my Web or Worker role was deployed for less than an hour, how much do I get billed for?" and the answer mentions:

Any partial clock hour is billed as a full hour if the deployment was longer than five minutes within one clock hour.

The current pricing page has a FAQ which states this is incorrect.

If my web or worker role was deployed for less than an hour, how much do I get billed for?

And the answer states:

Cloud services are billed based on the duration of time your service was deployed for. If your instance was deployed for less than an hour, or multiple hours plus some fraction of hour, you will be charged for that duration only. Azure does not round up the partial hour to full hour for billing—you pay for exactly the duration of time that your cloud services instance was in "running" state.