Azure Updates Could Help Control Costs

• Reservations, price changes, new purchasing options, and promotions can help reduce Azure costs.
• New Azure service capabilities could offer cheaper alternatives for deploying solutions.
• Organizations should stay abreast of ongoing updates as part of an overall strategy to manage Azure costs.

Reservations, new service options, and pricing changes can cut costs or make costs more predictable. However, customers might have to make technical changes to realize cost reductions.

Cost-Saving Reservations Available on Many Services

Azure Reserved VM Instances allow organizations to make advance spending commitments to save significant amounts of money and control costs on Azure VM compute time. A reserved instance is a credit on Azure VM compute time that will be automatically applied to any VMs that match specific criteria.

Savings depend on the types of VMs used and other factors. Discounts relative to pay-as-you-go (PAYG) spending could be up to 72%, assuming PAYG charges remain the same and are not reduced with promotions during the time period. Reservations provide a more certain advantage when a VM’s minimum workload fully uses the reserved capacity; however, customers could over-spend by purchasing reservations for capacity that goes unused.