Microsoft Azure, like many other cloud service providers, have built their billing and subscription models on a pay-per-use basis, i.e., if you use one hour of CPU time you pay for the hour you have consumed. No more, no less.
This basic economic principle forms the foundation of most public cloud services. However, the implementation of this simple concept can be quite complex and intricate. This is especially true if the cloud provider offers a wide variety of cloud services which utilize computing resources in different ways as is the case with Microsoft Azure.
