Azure VM Costs Explained

Multiple factors contribute to the overall cost of running workloads within Azure VMs, including charges related to compute time, use of Windows Server, a commercial Linux distribution, or server applications with run-time licensing costs. Other charges related to each VM include charges for storage of the VM and data, certain networking features, and potential charges for data exiting Azure. Additional Azure services that can enhance management and security of Azure VMs like Microsoft Defender for Servers, Azure Monitor, Azure Automation, and Microsoft Sentinel will each bring additional charges.

Charges related to Azure VMs are billed under an hourly pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model. 

Compute costs. Regardless of the OS or other software running within the VM, customers are assessed an hourly compute charge for all VMs hosted in Azure, which covers the costs of the underlying host hardware residing in Microsoft’s data centers. Azure offers multiple categories of VM hosts, called series. Each series of host is designed by Microsoft to meet a specific workload objective, such as VMs with large amounts of memory, high-performance processors, or graphics processing units (GPUs). Each series is divided up into one or more VMs, in predefined sizes.