Microsoft quietly extends Azure reserved instances to five-year term
- Reference: 1595399650
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/22/azure_reserved_instances_five_years/
- Source link:
Reserved instances are the cheapest way to consume Azure resources – even [1]cheaper than spot instances . They allow use of the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which means Windows licences bought for on-prem use can instead be consumed in the cloud and the dark arts of licensing calculations again see reserved instances emerge as a very fine option on price.
Microsoft initially required buyers to pay upfront for reserved instances, but in late 2019 added pay-by-the-month options.
And now the company has quietly added a five-year reservation option.
A tiny [2]post from late June revealed that the Azure HBv2 Virtual Machine now offers a five-year reservation option.
The fine folk at Licensing School have [3]analysed the new offering and found it is a 67 per cent discount, even better than the 25 per cent for a one-year stint or 50 per cent for a three-year deal.
But if you bail from an HBv2 reservation, the penalty is 35 per cent rather than the usual 12.
The nature of the HBv2 explains why: the instance type boasts 120 CPU cores, 480GB of memory, 1.6TB of SSD and 200Gbps networking backed by an InfiniBand fabric. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft suggests the instance type as a fine option for high-performance computing.
The Register suggests that kind of rig isn't cheap, hence Microsoft seeking longer commitments and imposing higher charges on early quitters. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/13/azure_spot_vms/
[2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/announcing-extended-term-reservation-for-the-azure-hbv2-virtual-machine/
[3] https://www.licensingschool.co.uk/licensing-blog/2020/07/21/5-year-reservation-available/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Ms is acting more and more like a [redacted] [redacted]
It's more to stop people abusing the longer "leases". On a 3 year deal you "save" nearly £980 per month. After 4 months the amount you've saved is greater than the termination fee for the remaining contract (so a 3 year deal that you cancel after 4 months is better than being on no deal at all). The break even point compared to the 1 year deal is about 7 months.
If they kept the existing 12% cancellation fee, the break even point for the 5 year deal would stay at month 4, whereas the 35% fee means it's month 9.
Yes the exporting bandwidth fees are high, but there are ways round that too. If you can pipe it out via OneDrive you don't pay fees (because OneDrive is _in_ Azure so doesn't cost your system egress bandwidth), or if you can pipe it out through CloudFlare something similar applies (as they have a "Bandwidth Alliance")
Ms is acting more and more like a [redacted] [redacted]
But if you bail from an HBv2 reservation the penalty is 35 percent rather than the usual 12 percent.
in other words...
You really don't want to move to someone else's cloud now do you?
How much per GB to extract your data from these cloud offerings? That is one hidden cost that very few people talk about.
They really have you by the short and curlies don't they?