Pricing Options for Azure VMs
Azure provides various pricing models, including pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, and spot instances, each with its pricing structure.
- Pay as you go: Pay for compute capacity by the second, with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. Increase or decrease consumption on demand.
- Azure savings plan for compute: Save money across select compute services globally by committing to spend a fixed hourly amount for 1 or 3 years, unlocking lower prices until you reach your hourly commitment. Suited for dynamic workloads while accommodating for planned or unplanned changes.
- Reserved Instances: Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances provide significant cost reduction, compared to pay-as-you-go rates, when you commit to one-year or three-year terms. Suited for stable, predictable workloads with no planned changes.
- Spot: Buy unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts to run interruptible workloads.
Azure Savings Options
Azure offers various ways to reduce cloud costs in addition to the discounts provided by reserved and spot instances.
Azure Hybrid Benefit
Azure Hybrid Benefit allows organizations with existing Microsoft licenses for Windows Server or SQL Server in their on-premises data centers to apply those licenses in the Azure cloud. This can lead to significant discounts on Azure virtual machine costs, as it takes into account the existing software licensing.
This benefit applies to Windows Server VMs, SQL Server VMs, and Azure SQL Database service. When combined with reserved instances, it can result in a total discount of up to 85%. Additionally, certain Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server versions may offer three years of free security updates.
Azure Dev/Test Pricing
Azure Dev/Test Pricing offers substantial discounts for using Azure services for development and testing purposes. This includes running Windows VMs at the cost of Linux VMs, saving up to 55% on Azure SQL Database, and up to 50% on Logic Apps, particularly for BizTalk server processing in the cloud.
Azure Price Matching
Azure also commits to price matching with equivalent services on AWS, adjusting prices every three months to align with AWS price changes.
This price matching applies to various services, such as Linux VMs (in comparison to EC2 compute instances), Azure Functions (in comparison to Amazon Lambda), and Block Blob Storage ZRS HOT / COOL tier (in comparison to S3 Standard / Standard-Infrequent Access tier).
Azure Virtual Machine Pricing
Virtual Machines are one of the computing resources offered by Microsoft Azure. These are available on-demand and are scalable. Virtual Machines offers more control over the computing environment. Virtual Machines provides the flexibility of Virtualization without the need to purchase physical hardware to run it.
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