Once upon a time, there was a geek. He loved playing with new technology. And one day he decided to play with Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. He was happy as he was learning new things and clearly (as the picture shows) was very excited!

After few days, he got a credit card bill and he was surprised (Shocked rather) to see an entry that said 150$ and further inspection showed that it corresponds to Windows Azure subscription.

No wonder, he was mad! he cursed the service and was in no mood to investigate what had really happened. hurriedly, he posted defamatory comments on Forums (Plus Twitter Plus  Facebook plus other forums plus wait….Circles).

After a while, he calmed down and opened the MOCP (Microsoft online customer portal) site  to view details regarding his bill. he realized that he was charged money for a Azure web role. 

Now, he went to the Azure Management portal and saw that he had already stopped the role. Now, he was confused that why was he still charged? later, after taking his case to support guys plus few helpful comments in Windows Azure Forums, he figured that he was charged since he had not stopped the role. To stop being charged, he needed to delete the deployed service.

he realized that even though, he had stopped the service, the service was still on Azure machines and the compute resources that were assigned to his service could not be assigned to some other subscriber and so he was being charged. So he learned a very important lesson that day:

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Based on some (real life) questions asked regarding this issue on Windows Azure forums. I have also seen people first cursing the service to no end without understanding what really happened. Later, when they get the refund (in legitimate cases) they apologize. In the process, they manage to harm their reputation and embarrass Microsoft in the process. I just wish they knew that all they had to do was delete the service when no longer required. That’s it !