Reduce cloud costs with Shared virtual cores for Developers and Testers
In Azure the smaller configurations of Virtual Machines (either Windows or Linux) are:
Extra Small (A0) 1 Virtual Core shared 768 MB RAM
Small (A1) 1 Virtual Core 1.75 GB RAM
Medium (A2) 2 Virtual Cores 3.5 GB RAM
You can note that Extra-Small is the only configuration with shared virtual core.
Due to SQLServer requires a minimum of 1 GB of RAM, "Extra Small" has no enought size for running IIS and SQL Server.
The "shared virtual core" option is less expensive because you pay ONLY when your VM is consuming cycles of CPU (in other words, when App Server and DBMS are running; non waiting for requests).
Today, developers and testers must stop and re-start their VMs, in order to reduce costs (for example, at the night).
If Azuire can offer Small(A1) and Medium(A2) configurations with shared CPUs, developers and testers could pay only when they run their apps.
Shared virtual cores can be a competitive advantage for Azure over other providers of IaaS.

Thanks for the feedback. Let’s see if this picks up in votes but it sounds valuable.