New Cost Card Projects PAYG Spend for VMs in Azure Portal

A new feature in the Azure portal, the cost card, helps customers predict the cost of deploying a VM as specific choices are made during provisioning. The cost card, which will probably prove most useful to smaller customers or individual departments deploying stand-alone VMs, adjusts as customers make specific technical decisions during the manual provisioning process. For example, the cost card will estimate the costs of deploying a VM with Windows Server or Linux, both with or without the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server or SQL Server. It will also consider cost benefits if spot VMs are selected. In addition, the cost card will adjust the cost estimate based on specific storage or networking options and any additional management services that will be applied. 

In current form, the cost card is somewhat limited, as it applies only to PAYG customers (not typical enterprise customers) and can’t take reserved VM instances (RVMIs) or an Azure Savings Plan for Compute into account while tabulating costs. The cost card is also only available when using the portal UI for VM creation. It’s not yet available when creating VM Scale Sets or Compute Fleets, and there’s no scripting-based counterpart available to pre-assess costs when doing a large-scale deployment of VM resources.