Many organisations face growing cloud bills. When looking at ways of saving money with Azure, Azure reserved instances are a great way of achieving this.
In this article we tell you everything you need to know about Azure reserved instances and how you could save up to 72% of your Azure costs using this method.
Azure Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances are a great option for VM’s and Azure SQL. Reserved Instances allow you to plan ahead for predictable workloads and buy a 1 or 3-year reservation for the required resources. This comes at a huge discount and is an ideal way of reducing Azure spend.
Most businesses have a number of workloads that are predictable and reliable over the next few years. This strategy is not for every workload but when utilised properly it is a great way of saving up to 72%.
Why buy a reservations?
If you have consistent resource usage that supports reservations, buying a reservation gives you the option to reduce your costs. For example, when you continuously run instances of a service without a reservation, you’re charged at pay-as-you-go rates. When you buy a reservation, you immediately get the reservation discount. The resources are no longer charged at the pay-as-you-go rates.
How reservations work?
You effectively purchase a reservation and apply this to your Azure tenant. After the purchase, the reservation discount automatically applies to the resource usage that matches the attributes you select when you buy the reservation. Attributes include the SKU, regions (where applicable), and scope. Reservation scope selects where the reservation savings apply.
Azure reservations used to require to be paid upfront but there is now an option to pay for these on a monthly basis through a CSP partner like Bridgeall. The great thing about an Azure reservation is that even if you buy a 3 year reservation there is a way to cancel it if you no longer need it, so you aren’t completely locked in.
Azure reservations generally only apply to compute or storage costs and do not apply to any additional licenses or services.
What Azure products can I buy an Azure reservation?
- Reserved Virtual Machine Instance
- Azure Storage reserved capacity
- Azure Cosmos DB reserved capacity
- Azure Data Factory data flows
- SQL Database reserved vCore
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Azure Databricks
- App Service stamp fee
- Azure Database for MySQL
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- Azure Database for MariaDB
- Azure Data Explorer
- Azure Cache for Redis
- Azure Dedicated Host
- Azure Disk Storage reservations
Interested in exploring how you could save Azure costs with Azure reserved instances? Contact us today for a quote or book our Azure cost assessment today.
