Tag Archives: Azure Reservations

Grace period for Azure Reservation exchanges

Microsoft announced in October 2022 that Azure compute Reservations purchased on or after 1 January, 2024 would no longer be able to be exchanged. Then, in October 2023, they announced that there would be a grace period giving customers until at least 1 July, 2024 to exchange their Reservations for Azure Dedicated Host, Azure App Services, and Reserved Instances. The latest announcement in May 2024 states that the grace period is now extended until further notice.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4bPH4gl, and a useful article with some example scenarios here: https://bit.ly/3MdGC0m.

Reservation utilisation alerts

Reservations are a great way of saving money in Azure if you can commit to a 1-year or 3-year term for services such as virtual machine compute. However, savings are only made if the Reservations are used, stopping Pay-As-You-Go charges. Administrators have historically been able to view utilisation rates in the Azure Management Portal, but there’s now a new alert feature which sends an email whenever a Reservation exhibits low utilisation.

See the announcement article here: https://bit.ly/3qZSxah, and find information on how to set these alerts up here: https://bit.ly/44ocFRN.

Azure Reservations

Azure Reservations help customers to save money when they can make a duration commitment to an Azure service. Typically the duration is one or three years with, of course, the best savings to be made on a three-year commitment.

Today there are sixteen categories of Reservations ranging from Reserved Instances for virtual machines to Reserved Capacity for storage or database services, as well as Software Plans for Red Hat or SUSE Linux. Buying and managing Reservations, and understanding how discounts are applied can be confusing, but there’s some excellent Microsoft documentation available.

Find it here to dip into as you need to, or save it for the weekend and read it end-to-end: http://bit.ly/36W4KgJ.

Monthly payment option for Azure Reservations

Microsoft announce that a monthly payment option is now available for some Azure Reservations. There aren’t any additional costs for choosing to pay monthly rather than upfront, although if you’re in a non-US-dollar market the actual monthly payment may vary dependent on the exchange rate. Monthly payments are available for the following services: virtual machines, SQL Database, SQL Data Warehouse, Cosmos DB, and the App Service stamp fee, and it’s an option you select when you buy the Reservation from the Azure Management Portal.

Find some good pictures of the process and some FAQs here: http://bit.ly/2maim6g.

The original announcement is here: http://bit.ly/2lILGR0.

Azure Reservations

Azure Reservations are a way of pre-paying for an Azure resource over a one or three-year term to get the most cost-effective pricing. The Reservations family continues to grow: it started with Reserved Instances, a way of pre-paying for Azure virtual machine base compute, and was extended with Reserved Capacity, a way of pre-paying for Azure SQL Database compute capacity. Today the family also includes Software Reservations for SUSE Linux software, and Reserved Capacity for Azure Cosmos DB throughput.

This page (http://bit.ly/2Q3vm7J) gives you an overview of Reservations and if you expand the “Buy a reservation” link at the left you can get details on the current four members of the Reservations family.