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.

How Azure Reservations work with Azure SQL Database

Azure Reservations for the Azure SQL Database service became available earlier in August 2018 (see our blog post here: http://bit.ly/2KROzpp). If you want to understand more about how the reservation discount is applied automatically to running Azure SQL Databases then this is a useful article: http://bit.ly/2vX61UR.

SQL Server 2017 Licensing Datasheet

There’s a brand new SQL Server 2017 Licensing Datasheet to support general availability of this product on 2nd October 2017. There aren’t changes to the fundamental licensing but this datasheet is a nice summary including useful information such as the differences in SA benefits between Standard and Enterprise editions.

Find it in the Application Servers section here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.