At Arcible, we’re always promoting the use of public cloud for your infrastructure-as-a-service virtual machine workloads, however, are you paying too much for them? In this article, we will cover Azure Reserved Instances, what they are, how you can use them, and what value they offer.
At Arcible, we’re always promoting the use of public cloud for your infrastructure-as-a-service virtual machine workloads, however, are you paying too much for them? In this article, we will cover Azure Reserved Instances, what they are, how you can use them, and what value they offer.
Understanding your costs
When deploying Azure Virtual Machine instances, you know what you are getting: a reliable service at an easily calculated cost based on what you consume for how long. In a very simple example, we know that consuming a D11v2 virtual machine for 24 hours a day for an entire month is going to cost around £150 a month depending on the region you pick.
If you follow our advice on shutting down Azure virtual machines out of business hours then you can save a significant about of money. The thing is, there is a way we can save even more money making public cloud even more viable for the cost-conscious.
So what are Reserved Instances?
As is common in most organisations, you have some services which you cannot live without: Active Directory Domain Services, File Services, Database Servers, and more. These typical infrastructure servers and others you may have are likely to be with you for at least a year or two in one way or another. When you deploy these roles to Microsoft Azure, you are going to be paying to run these servers for the long-term.
Azure Reserved Instances is an agreement between your organisation and Microsoft Azure that you will commit to a certain number of virtual machines for a period of time. In exchange for your long-term commitment, Microsoft offers you savings based on the term of your commitment and the size of your commitment. You can commit for either a one-year or a three-year period. The longer you commit and the more machines you commit to, the bigger the savings.
The exact circumstances of your savings, given the different factors, vary from business to business but here’s a quick example to give you an idea. For a single D11v2 virtual machine committed for one year, the price falls from around £150 per month to £112. If you commit for three-years instead of just one, the price drops again to £91 per month.
If you want to find out more about Azure Reserved Instances, you can find the full background on the Microsoft Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances page.
Who can use Reserved Instances?
The great news is that Reserved Instances aren’t an Enterprise Agreement customer special offer or limited to specific customer types: they are available to everyone. Better yet, you can apply Reserved Instances to your existing Azure virtual machine fleet. If you have already started consuming VMs in Azure you can apply a Reserved Instance to them today without any rebuild or rework and start saving straight away. All you need to do it set your commitment level and you’re off.
Calculating your savings
So we’ve shown you at a really high-level the kind of savings that are possible with Azure Reserved Instances and no doubt we’ve got you interested and you want to know exactly what you stand to save and how to sign-up for Reserved Instances.
The simple answer is to get in touch with us using our contact page. We can help you assess your current Azure usage, whether there are optimisations to be made and to design your Reserved Instance usage parameters. We can show you exactly what you can save, where you can save, and start reducing your operational spend.