Introduction
Azure savings plan for compute helps you significantly optimize the cost of your compute resources when compared with pay-as-you-go prices.
Example scenario
Suppose you manage billing for Microsoft Azure services deployed by a global media company that stores, processes, and maintains large volumes of online content for its subscribers. As an enterprise customer, the company has been relying heavily on a wide range of Azure services. The billing data you regularly review indicates a relatively consistent usage of compute and data services, including Linux and Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), Dedicated Hosts, Container Instances, App Services, Azure Storage, and Cosmos DB over the last year. Yet, your environment is dynamic, with frequent changes to service SKUs and workloads that transition across Azure regions in the follow-the-sun manner and are rearchitected to take full advantage of the cloud capabilities. You expect this pattern to continue for the foreseeable future. In addition, due to increasing dependency on Azure Functions, the company is also considering transitioning from the current Consumption plan to the Elastic Premium plan.
To minimize the cost, you decided to take advantage of Azure reservations and applied it to both compute and storage resources in all your subscriptions. While this arrangement allowed you to realize significant cost savings, you found it challenging to manage due to the dynamic nature of your environment and its size, which consists of hundreds of subscriptions.
Now you’re looking for an alternative offering that provides comparable cost savings but minimizes the management overhead associated with the dynamic nature and size of your environment. You want to examine the Azure savings plan for compute and determine whether it can help you accomplish your objective.
What are we doing?
In this module, you'll explore the characteristics and benefits of Azure savings plan for compute and identify scenarios where these benefits are relevant. You'll review the process for purchasing Azure savings plan for compute. Then you'll examine considerations associated with managing and maintaining Azure savings plan throughout the entire duration of the commitment period.
What is the main goal?
By the end of this module, you'll be able to describe the characteristics and benefits of Azure savings plan for compute and identify scenarios most suitable for its usage. You'll also be able to outline the process for purchasing Azure savings plan and explain how to manage and maintain Azure savings plan throughout the entire duration of the commitment period.