The Microsoft Azure team recently announced significant (up to 72%) discounts for customers willing to make one- to three-year reservations. Reserved Instances (RI) are not new, of course – Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had RI for a long time. But are there differences in how the Azure team rolled out RI?
For example: When does it really make sense to use an RI? Can RI discounts be combined with unique offers, like Azure Hybrid Benefit? Can customers cancel their reservation or exchange reserved VM types? What are some of best practices when making these decisions about one-year vs. three-year reservations?
We tried to answer many of these questions in the slide deck below, which we prepared for an internal briefing.
RI Essentials [PDF]
Hope this helps, and please let us know if you have any additional questions in the comments below!