Azure Savings Plans vs. Azure RVMIs

For Azure Savings Plan for Compute, an organization specifies an amount of money that it expects to spend on an hourly basis during a one- or three-year period. That specified amount is applied automatically to the low-water mark of any applicable compute resources that the organization consumes during the savings plan term. Reservations, by comparison, are purchased for a specific type and quantity of Azure services. Azure Savings Plan for Databases offers a similar value proposition to Savings Plan for Compute, but applies to a range of Azure database services and SQL Server running within Azure VMs (no discount applies to the latter.)

In contrast to Reserved VM Instances (RVMIs) or other compute reservations, an Azure savings plan will typically offer lower savings but more flexibility.

For savings plans, the spend per hour is based on the customer’s local currency for Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers, and U.S. dollars (USD) for Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) customers.