Decide between a savings plan and a reservation

Azure provides you with two ways to save on your usage by committing for one or three years. You have the freedom to choose the savings options that best align with your workload patterns.

Compare reservations with savings plans

With reservations, you commit to a specific compute instance/instance family, in a particular Azure region, for a term (e.g. D2v4 VM in Japan East for one year). With an Azure savings plan, you commit to spend a fixed hourly spend on eligible compute services across all Azure regions, for a term (e.g. $5.00/hour for three years). Reservations only apply to the specified compute service and region combination. Savings plan benefits are applicable to all usage from participating compute services across the globe, up to the hourly commitment.

Choose a reservation

Choose reservations for For highly stable workloads that run continuously, and where you have no expected changes to the instance/instance family or region. When fully utilized, reservations provide the greatest savings.

Choose a savings plan

Choose savings plans For dynamic/evolving workloads, especially when you leverage different instance families, compute services or have workloads running-in/changing-to different datacenter regions. Savings plans provide deep savings, flexible benefit application and automatic optimization.

Next steps

For general information about savings plans, see What is Azure savings plans for compute?.