Azure Reserved instances - What/Why/When/Who

What is RI - Microsoft recently released Reserved Instances which can provide a huge discount on running virtual machines in Azure With Reserved instances you commit compute capacity either 1 year or 3 year upfront. Most of the time it will give 72% to 35% discount rate.

A price example from the Microsoft Azure price calculator does not reflect EA prices.

When/Who/Why RI - So if you are running static workloads in Azure, meaning virtual machines that are running 24/7 and not being powered on/off it sounds like a best practice to enable RI for those instances. This feature should not be enabled for virtual machines that are powered off during the night because with RI you will need to pay for the virtual machine regardless if it is running or not. This does give you some predictability when it comes to compute cost, but it does not apply to other services such as storage/bandwidth and such. However, there are some limitations to RI as it is now.

1. It is only available for Pay-as-you-go and EA agreements (no CSP and Open support, CSP coming Q1 2018)
2. RI only apply to VMs, VM Scale Sets, and other services that spin up VMs in a customer subscription, such as Azure Batch in customer subscription mode
3. * Azure RIs are available for all VM families other than A-series, A_v2 series, or G-series (and also VM-series in Preview such as B-series)

* Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers, Azure Monetary Commitment can be used to purchase Azure Reserved VM Instances. In scenarios where EA customers have used all of their monetary commitment, RI’s can still be purchased, and those purchases will be invoiced on their next overage bill. For customers using pay-as-you-go Azure.com, at the time of purchase, the credit card on file will be charged for the full upfront payment of the Azure Reserved Instances.

* RI are scoped to an Azure region and instance type (No option to choose an amount of vCPU and RAM, but you need to choose instance type such as D2_v2)

You can enable reserved instances by going into the Microsoft Azure portal and going into the reserved instances panel in the portal, and from there selecting the number of instances and size type and choosing accept.

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