That’s the way to do it! While we rarely get a price war in the cloud space these days, companies do like to roll out discounts every now and then.
Like now, for instance — pun always intended.
The reserved instance offer that Microsoft had going has recently been expanded in all the right directions. And this is rather important, keeping in view the fact that RIs are very much the cheapest way to consumer Azure.
Basically, users sign up to pay upfront for one or three years in return for discounts that can see pricing go well below the pay-as-you-go model. A pro-rata refund is also available if users decide to bail, making them even more alluring.
No surprises that Microsoft pushes reserved instances hard, and so does its channel.
To keep a good thing going, the company has expanded Reserved Instances to cover classic virtual machines, Azure Cloud Services and Dev/Test subscriptions.
The inclusion of Classic VMs is very interesting, as they are an instance type from an older version of the Azure management portal. These offer management features than the ones that are available in the current console — which itself recently got a facelift.
Apparently, the company hasn’t forgotten them, and offers these users that are tied to its old approaches a nice long future on the platform.
Same goes for Dev/Test subscriptions, and the inclusion of these type of use case makes a world of sense. Microsoft is very keen on signing up developers to its cloud platform, and what better way to get them on by offering them better control over their spending.
Cloud Services see the reservation discount applied only to the compute cost.
But we’ll take it!
