Azure pricing

What is Azure pricing?

Azure pricing refers to how Microsoft bills for its Azure cloud computing platform. Azure pricing is based on a pay-as-you-go approach, which means you only pay for the resources you utilize. There are no up-front or cancellation fees. Azure also provides reserved and spot instances, which can help you save money on cloud fees.

Pricing models in Azure

Azure's pricing model offers diverse options to match varying business needs. From flexible Pay-As-You-Go plans for dynamic workloads to Reserved Instances for cost efficiency, Azure Hybrid Benefit for license optimization, and serverless options like Azure Functions, discover a range of choices tailored to your cloud computing requirements.

Pay-as-you-go: This is a flexible pricing model where you pay only for the resources you use hourly or per minute. There are no upfront costs or long-term commitments. This model suits businesses with variable workloads or testing and development environments.

Reserved instances (RIs): Reserved Instances allow you to commit to a one- or three-year term and receive a significant discount on the virtual machine (VM) pricing. This is ideal for stable and predictable workloads.

Spot instances: Spot Instances allow you to use unused Azure capacity at a much lower cost than Pay-As-You-Go rates. However, Azure can reclaim these instances if other customers need accommodation.

Azure hybrid benefit: If you have on-premises Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance, you can apply the Azure Hybrid Benefit to use those licenses in Azure and get a reduced rate for virtual machines.

In addition to these models listed above, Azure also offers a variety of other pricing options for specific services. For example, you can get discounts on Azure storage if you commit to a certain ...