Purchasing a Microsoft Azure Reservation saves you money on the infrastructure charges (compute) for virtual machines or Azure SQL Databases. After purchase you have the following options for adjusting your Microsoft Azure Reservation:

• Changing the Subscription it applies to
• Splitting a single reservation into two reservations
• Adding or changing users who can manage a reservation
• Optimizing for Virtual Machine Size Flexibility or Capacity Priority.

For further information on the Microsoft Azure Reservations, please visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-manage-reserved-vm-instance and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-understand-reservation-charges.

Microsoft announced the General Availability of Microsoft Azure Instance Size Flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances. In the past, when purchasing a Microsoft Reserved Instance, you had to define the size of the virtual machine and the data center. Changing those properties was only possible by using the Exchange function to get a credit for the existing Reserved Instance to use against a new Reserved Instance with the required attributes.

This has changed now and you are no longer prepaying for base compute of a particular virtual machine type, instead you’re now prepaying for a certain amount of compute for a particular family in a specific data center. Now, a Reserved Instance can be applied to any virtual machine in that family, covering all or part of the base compute costs.
For further information on Microsoft Azure Instance Size Flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine, please visit https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-of-instance-size-flexibility-for-azure-reserved-virtual-machine-instances/ or https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/reserved-vm-instance-size-flexibility for some more examples.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to help organizations detect advanced attacks in a hybrid environment. Microsoft Azure Advanced Threat Protection is available as a standalone User Subscription License (USL) and is also added to Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) E5 USLs.

For more information about Microsoft Azure Advanced Threat Protection, please visit: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2018/03/01/introducing-azure-advanced-threat-protection-2/

Microsoft launched Azure Reserved Instances in November 2017 giving customers a more cost-effective way of buying Azure base instance virtual machines. The existing Azure Calculator has been updated to show relative pricing between the regular pay-as-you-go option for virtual machines and 1-year or 3-year Reserved Instances.

Find the Azure Calculator here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/.

The Azure Hybrid Benefit allows customers with Windows Server licenses with Software Assurance (SA) to use those licenses in Azure to license a base virtual machine for Windows Server.

To identify the potential savings this benefit can offer, please find the Azure Hybrid Benefit Savings Calculator here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/hybrid-benefit/#ahub-calculator.

Please note that it still works on Processor-based licenses so if you’ve got Core licenses then divide the number of licenses by 16 when you input the number of existing licenses with SA.

In December 2017, Microsoft introduced two changes to the way Azure Monetary Commitment works in an Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA).

Historically, Monetary Commitment was an amount paid upfront annually for the Azure consumption services which was decremented as services were used, with any unused Monetary Commitment being forfeited at the end of the year. This remains as an “Annually Prepaid Option” but now there’s a “Fully Prepaid Option” too. Under this option a customer pays for 36 months of Monetary Commitment upfront but the funds are available for the whole of the Enrolment term. This means there are also some changes in the minimum amount of Monetary Commitment required: € 3,035.88 under the Enterprise Enrolment and € 30,358.80 under the Server and Cloud Enrolment.

The second change is the removal of the Consumption Allowance: previously customers with a Direct EA could pay for any Azure overage at anniversary if they remained within the Consumption Allowance (50% of the original Monetary Commitment). Now all new and renewing EA customers will pay for overage on a quarterly basis.

Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator in preview. The Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator allows you to configure and estimate the costs for Microsoft Azure products.

To estimate your expected monthly bill, please try the Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/preview/.