I wanted to quickly share something which existing for quite some time but talking with customers still a lot of people don’t know about it yet. And since yesterday the Azure team also shared some news on it, so it is the perfect time to have a look at Azure Reservations (Azure Reserved VM Instances or Reserved capacity). Usually, you pay Azure services in a Pay-As-You-Go model, which gives you the pricing flexibility and agility you expect from the cloud. But, a lot of customers have services like virtual machines or databases which need to run continuously for the next years. With purchasing reservations for these Azure services, you give the Azure team visibility into your one-year or three-year resource needs in advance, and this allows the Azure team to be more efficient with capacity planning. In return, reservations will give you back these savings to you as discounts of up to 72 percent.
The significant change which was announced yesterday is that there are now monthly payment options available for Azure reservations. Which means you can now pay reservations upfront or on a monthly basis. You can find more information about Azure Reservations on Microsoft Docs.
Azure Reservations Chart
No worries, you can mix Azure reservations for your predictable capacity needs, with the Pay-As-You-Go model for your unpredictable capacity needs. While purchasing reservations is only a few simple steps in the Azure portal, we also understand that your workload and application needs may change, and exchanging reservations is easy. You can even cancel your reservation at any time and get the remaining months returned for a termination fee.
Azure Reservations are currently available as Azure reserved instances (RIs), for Windows and Linux virtual machines. As well as Azure reserved capacity for Azure data services, like Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. But there are also a lot of other services available.
Azure Reservations Reserved Instances and reserved capacity
Combining the Azure Reserved VM Instances and the Azure Hybrid Benefit, you even can save up to 80 percent. To learn more about Azure RIs or reserved capacity, check out the following pages:
To find out more about reservations, check out the Azure reservations page. You should also have a look at the lastest new options like the Azure Dedicated Host and VMware solutions on Azure. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.
Tags: Azure, Azure Cost Management, Azure Reservations, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cost, Hybrid Benefit, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, Reservations, Reserved Capacity, Reserved Instances, Save money, Virtual machines Last modified: September 5, 2019
The announcement link is dead?
Works again :)
What are the limitations once you have reserved a VM instance? Can you upgrade the VM instance due to poor performance after?
For example if I purchase B4MS and need to increase to B8MS, is this possible?
Also can I increase my VM Tier to another from B4MS to D4VS?
Hello Thomas
Thanks for this introduction.
I have questions regarding instance size flexibility for VM RI.
This setting is defaulted to yes and will allow VMs from the same compute family and azure region as your reservation.
For instance reserving d4sv3 vs in eastus2 can cover d2sv2 vms in eastus2
In that case, does it take “half a slot”? Given that resources are double in d4sv3?
Or does it take one slut ?
Basically the overall question is : Should I rather use d2sv3 reservations or d4sv3 reservations in this situation
Looking forward to your reply
Thanks
Lucas