Recent Azure Cost-Savings Opportunities

 

Reservations, new service options, and pricing changes can cut Azure costs or make costs more predictable. However, customers might have to make deployment changes to realize cost reductions. Organizations should stay abreast of ongoing updates as part of an overall strategy to manage Azure costs.

Azure cost-savings opportunities that arrived during 2020 include the following:

• Several additional services, such as SQL Database Hyperscale, can be purchased using reservations where customers pay upfront for future usage at discounted rates
• Spot VMs, which are unused Azure capacity for noncritical workloads at highly discounted rates, became generally available in Apr. 2020
• Azure Advisor, which provides custom recommendations on deployment right-sizing and other cost-savings opportunities, offers additional recommendations; for example, right-sizing recommendations are now offered for MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL resources, and reservations recommendations are now offered for