Azure Updates - Latest from Azure Charts

Announcing: Minimum billable object size for cooler storage tiers

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:15:15 Z

For storage accounts with Azure Blob or Data Lake Storage (ADLS) we are introducing a minimum billable object size for the cool, cold and archive access tiers of 128KiB. Objects on those tiers that are smaller than 128 KiB will be billed as 128 KiB object
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Data Lake Storage, Azure Storage, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Understanding Fabric Eventstream Pricing

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:00:00 Z

In this blog post, we’ll walk through Eventstream’s pricing model to give you a clear understanding of how it works and help you navigate it with confidence. By the end of this post, you will be able to: Eventstream Components & Cost Drivers First, let’s summarize the components of a Fabric Eventstream: Each component maps … Continue reading “Understanding Fabric Eventstream Pricing”
Update Type: Announcement, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Cloud-native apps on Kubernetes pricing calculator scenario

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 21:00:35 Z

The new cloud-native apps on Kubernetes pricing calculator scenario allows teams to estimate the total cost of ownership for a production-ready AKS cluster with other key Azure services, including Azure Container Registry, Azure Monitoring, Microsoft Defe
Update Type: GA, Services: Kubernetes Service, Container Registry, Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing: API Center Standard now included at no additional cost for linked Azure API Management Standard and Premium tiers

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:00:16 Z

API Center Standard, previously a separate paid offering, is now included at no additional cost for all Azure API Management Standard and Premium customers, when an API Center instance is linked with a corresponding Azure API Management service (for both
Update Type: Announcement, Services: API Management, API Center, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

RHEL Software Reservations Now Available on Azure with Updated Pricing

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:45:57 Z

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) software reservations are now available again for purchase on Azure following important updates to billing meters and pricing. This update addresses issues with previous billing meters and aligns with Red Hat's new pricing
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Sharing Capacity Reservation Groups

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:15:20 Z

The ability to share Capacity Reservation Groups (CRGs) with subscriptions is now in Public Preview. Previously, customers could deploy VMs in a Capacity Reservation Group within the same subscription only. On-demand Capacity Reservation Group (CRG) can
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

The Linux Consumption hosting plan of Azure Functions will be retired on September 30, 2028. Migrate to Flex Consumption.

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:30:29 Z

The Azure Functions Linux Consumption hosting plan is being retired. Customers are advised to migrate to the Flex Consumption plan, which offers faster scaling, advanced networking, cold start mitigation, and concurrency control. To identify affected reso
Update Type: Deprecation, Services: Azure Functions, App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure NetApp Files Flexible service level

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 17:00:08 Z

Flexible service level allows you to independently configure storage capacity and throughput, optimizing costs and performance by right-sizing based on your needs. This new service level avoids overprovisioning by supporting a customizable throughput whic
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

At-cost data transfer between Azure and an external endpoint

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:30:32 Z

We support customer choice, including the choice to transfer your data between Azure and environments outside of Azure. Azure now offers at-cost data transfer for customers and CSP partners in Europe transferring data via the internet between Azure to ano
Update Type: GA, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Bring Your Own License (BYOL) Support for JBoss EAP on Azure App Service

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 14:30:17 Z

Announcong that Azure App Service now supports Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), enabling enterprise customers to deploy Java workloads with greater flexibility and cost efficiency.If you’ve evaluated Azure App
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Private Preview: Azure AMD-based Dasv7, Easv7, and Fasv7-series Virtual Machines

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:45:15 Z

The general purpose Dasv7 and Dalsv7, memory-optimized Easv7, and compute-optimized Fasv7, Falsv7, Famsv7 VMs, are now available in preview with and without local disk support. These VMs are now available in the East US 2, North Europe, and West US 3 regi
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Ultra Disk Price Reduction in UK South

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 17:00:13 Z

Ultra Disks are the most performant block storage option for Azure virtual machines offering consistent low sub-millisecond latency, extremely high performance. This makes Ultra disk ideal for a broad spectrum of the most demanding enterprise production w
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Managed Disks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Ultra Disk Price Reduction in Central US

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 17:00:13 Z

Azure Ultra Disk Price Reduction in West US 2

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 17:00:13 Z

Azure App Service - New Premium v4 Offering

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:00:58 Z

The new Premium v4 offering provides faster processors, NVMe local storage, and memory-optimized options, running on the latest Azure hardware. Premium v4 is available for both Windows and Linux customers, and includes sizes starting from 1 vCPU and 4GB o
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Front Door Standard and Premium are now available in Azure China.

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:00:54 Z

Azure Front Door Standard and Premium are now generally available in the Azure China regions (China North 3 and China East 3), operated by 21Vianet. With this release, customers in China can deliver secure, reliable, and high-performance applications usin
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Azure Monitor, Azure Front Door, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for SSD (premium)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:30:50 Z

Azure Files now supports the provisioned v2 billing model on the SSD (premium) media tier. Provisioned v2 enables independent provisioning of storage, IOPS, and throughput, allowing you to create a file share that meets your exact storage and performance
Update Type: GA, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Virtual Network Manager mesh now supports 5,000 virtual networks

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:00:50 Z

Azure Virtual Network Manager mesh connectivity is now in public preview, enabling you to group up to 5,000 virtual networks in supported regions. A mesh topology creates bi‑directional connectivity between every virtual network in a mesh connectivity con
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Network, VNet Manager, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Virtual Network Manager in Azure US Government Cloud

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 17:00:19 Z

Azure Virtual Network Manager is now generally available in Azure US Government Cloud, providing unified control for connectivity, security, and routing across subscriptions, regions, and tenants. By automating configurations, it guarantees consistent pol
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Network, Azure Firewall, Virtual WAN, VNet Manager, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Virtual Network Manager in Azure China

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:00:05 Z

Azure Virtual Network Manager’s connectivity, security admin, and routing configuration features are now generally available in Azure China. This enables centralized management of connectivity, security rules, and routing across subscriptions at scale and
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Network, Azure Firewall, Virtual WAN, VNet Manager, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric explained: benefits, use cases, and pricing demystified

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:01:32 Z

Co-Author: Maraki Ketema, Principal Product Manager Unlocking Data Value at Scale: Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric In the modern data era, speed, scale, and simplicity are no longer luxuries—they’re expectations. Organizations want to harness the power of their operational data in real time, without the overhead of complex ETL pipelines or latency-filled data movement. This is … Continue reading “Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric explained: benefits, use cases, and pricing demystified”
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Microsoft Fabric, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

New Free Tier in Azure API Center

Fri, 23 May 2025 15:00:30 Z

Announcing Azure API Center is transitioning from a 90-day free trial period to offering a free tier. Azure API Center serves as a centralized hub to catalog, discover, and manage MCP servers and APIs, regardless of their type or deployment location withi
Update Type: Preview, Services: API Management, API Center, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Traffic Manager SLA raised to 100%

Wed, 21 May 2025 18:45:50 Z

Azure Traffic Manager has raised its service level agreement (SLA) to 100% for global DNS resolution, ensuring that all DNS queries consistently resolve to a healthy endpoint. No changes are required from customers to benefit from this SLA update. All exi
Update Type: GA, Services: Traffic Manager, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure App Service - New Premium v4 Offering

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:30:18 Z

The new Premium v4 offering provides faster processors, NVMe local storage, and memory-optimized options, running on the latest Azure hardware. Premium v4 includes sizes starting from 1 vCPU and 4GB of memory all the way up to 32 vCPU and 256GB memory. Le
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Network Optimized Azure Virtual Machines - Dnsv6, Dndsv6, Dnlsv6, Dnldsv6, Ensv6 and Endsv6

Mon, 19 May 2025 20:30:01 Z

Azure announces the public preview of our very first Network Optimized VMs built on the new 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8537C (Emerald Rapids) offering unparalleled performance and flexibility. These Intel-based VMs come with three different memory-to-c
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure App Configuration now offers a Developer pricing plan

Tue, 13 May 2025 18:15:37 Z

To provide a new flexible and cost-effective option for developers, Azure App Configuration now offers a Developer pricing plan. This new plan is ideal for development teams looking for a reliable configuration store for development and testing, and for
Update Type: GA, Services: App Configuration, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Storage Actions – Serverless storage data management

Tue, 06 May 2025 15:30:51 Z

Azure Storage Actions, our fully managed platform that transforms how organizations automate data management tasks for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage, is now generally available in select Azure regions. Azure Storage Actions enables you to quickly comp
Update Type: GA, Services: Storage Actions, Data Lake Storage, Azure Storage, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Static Web Apps – Dedicated Pricing Plan

Fri, 02 May 2025 19:15:53 Z

To focus on supporting users of the Standard pricing plan, the Static Web Apps Dedicated pricing plan (currently in Public Preview) will be retired on October 31, 2025. Deployments using the Dedicated pricing plan can be migrated to the Static Web Apps
Update Type: Deprecation, Services: App Service, Container Apps, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP)

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:30:43 Z

Virtual network TAP enables customers to continuously stream virtual machine network traffic to a network packet collector or analytics tool. Unlike traditional packet capture solutions that require the deployment of additional agents or network appliance
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Virtual Network, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Compute Fleet

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 16:30:27 Z

Azure Compute Fleet is now generally available in all regions. Azure Compute Fleet allows users to easily obtain large amounts of compute capacity algorithmically mixing and matching a variety of available and VM sizes suitable to a user's workload, up to
Update Type: GA, Services: Compute Fleet, Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Avaialble: Azure NVads V710 v5-series virtual machines

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:00:08 Z

The NVads V710 v5-series virtual machines are designed for lightweight AI inferencing and graphics-intensive applications that demand cost-effective, high-performance GPUs with more memory and faster CPUs. Powered by AMD Radeon™ Pro V710 GPUs and 4th gen
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Virtual Desktop, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure NetApp Files Flexible service level

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:00:59 Z

Flexible service level allows you to independently configure storage capacity and throughput, optimizing costs and performance by right-sizing based on your needs. This new service level avoids overprovisioning by supporting a customizable throughput whic
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Enhance Performance and Security with Standard Load Balancer and Standard SKU Public IP Addresses in Azure DevTest Labs

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:30:31 Z

We are excited to announce enhancements in Azure DevTest Labs to support Azure’s retirement of Basic Load Balancer and Basic SKU public IP addresses. Azure DevTest Labs will now use Standard Load Balancer to manage traffic for VMs created with Shared IPs.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Load Balancer, Virtual Machines, DevTest Labs, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure NetApp Files Application Volume Group for Oracle

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:00:04 Z

Application volume group (AVG) for Oracle enables you to deploy all volumes required to install and operate Oracle databases at enterprise scale, with optimal performance and according to best practices, in a single one-step and optimized workflow. The ap
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Lower Pricing for Azure Confidential Ledger

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 14:30:22 Z

Effective March 1, 2025, you can keep your records in Azure confidential ledger (ACL) at the reduced price of approximately $3 per day per instance. The reduced price is for the computation and the ledger use. To protect your records, automatically create
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Functions, SQL Database, Confidential Ledger, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Private preview: User-defined functions for Azure confidential ledger

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 19:00:13 Z

Azure confidential ledger now allows you to deploy custom business logic written in JavaScript/TypeScript and take advantage of increased protection of data in memory by running those scripts in a trusted execution environment (TEE). For example, create c
Update Type: Preview, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Site Recovery Pricing Calculator for Azure to Azure Managed Disks

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 22:00:17 Z

We are excited to announce the availability of the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Pricing calculator. This new tool helps organizations estimate the total cost of ownership (TCO) for Azure-to-Azure ASR scenarios. The calculator's goal is to achieve detailed co
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Site Recovery, Managed Disks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

New Pricing for Azure Virtual Network Manager

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:15:29 Z

With Azure Virtual Network Manager, a central management service for your virtual network resources, you can easily manage your virtual networks’ connectivity, security, and more at scale. Starting February 11, 2025, all newly created Azure Virtual Netwo
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Network, VNet Manager, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Changes to instance size flexibility ratios for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances for M-series

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 23:00:44 Z

As we continue to offer a wide selection of SKUs for M-series Virtual Machines, we updated the instance size flexibility ratios for this product to optimize reservation discount within instance size flexibility groups and their respective SKUs. This updat
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Notice: Changes to instance size flexibility ratios for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances for M-series

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:00:42 Z

As we continue to offer a wide selection of SKUs for M-series Virtual Machines, we updated the instance size flexibility ratios for this product to optimize reservation discount within instance size flexibility groups and their respective SKUs. This updat
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for HDD (standard)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:00:04 Z

The provisioned v2 model for Azure Files HDD (standard) pairs predictability of total cost of ownership with flexibility, allowing you to create a file share that meets your exact storage and performance requirements. Provisioned v2 shares enable independ
Update Type: GA, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Extension of limited-time promotional discounts on Azure Databricks Serverless Compute Services

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 20:30:21 Z

We’re excited to announce the extension of the promotional discounts on serverless compute for Notebooks, Jobs, and Pipelines (Delta Live Tables). You will continue to get 50% off serverless compute for Jobs and Pipelines and 30% off serverless compute fo
Update Type: GA, Services: Databricks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Enhancements on Elastic SAN on resiliency, scalability, and integration with Azure VMWare Solution

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 21:15:04 Z

We have published an availability Service Level Agreement (SLA). The SLA can be found here, and will provide peace of mind for those of you running mission critical workloads on Elastic SAN. Additionally, we have enabled CRC protection to help customers
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure NetApp Files, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Elastic SAN, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Da/Ea/Fav6 series AMD based Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 17:30:38 Z

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the new Da/Ea/Fav6 series AMD based virtual machines (VMs). These VMs consist of our new general purpose Dasv6-series and Dalsv6-series, our new memory optimized Easv6-series VM series, and our new compu
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Enhancements on Azure Container Storage for performance, scalability, and operational insights

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 23:30:31 Z

We are excited to unveil key advancements in Azure Container Storage, our purpose-built storage solution for stateful containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). These updates bring increased performance and improved reliability to support even the most
Update Type: GA, Services: Container Storage, Virtual Machines, Kubernetes Service, Azure Storage, Managed Disks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure NetApp Files cool access support for large volumes

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:00:36 Z

Announcing the general availability of cool access feature support with large volumes. This allows tiering of infrequently accessed data on large volumes under standard, premium or ultra storage, to a lower-cost storage tier. This allows your large capac
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure API Management Premium v2 Tier

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:00:35 Z

We are thrilled to introduce the Public Preview of the Azure API Management Premium v2 Tier, our most powerful, high-capacity option for managing APIs at enterprise scale. This tier is designed for organizations requiring enhanced performance, greater ent
Update Type: Preview, Services: API Management, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Functions Flex Consumption plan

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 16:00:37 Z

Flex Consumption plan is a new Azure Functions hosting plan that builds on the consumption pay per second serverless billing model with automatic scale down to zero when not in use for cost efficiency., It provides you with more flexibility and customizab
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Functions, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Da/Ea/Fav6 series AMD based Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:30:04 Z

Generally Available: Enhancements on Elastic SAN on resiliency, security, scalability, and integration with Azure VMWare Solution

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Elastic SAN has released new features around improving data integrity, simplifying the management experience of a SAN, improving cost-effectiveness for AVS, and published a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Elastic SAN, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Edit network features for Azure NetApp Files with no downtime

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 08:30:23 Z

We are announcing the public preview of Edit network features with no downtime for Azure NetApp Files volumes. Standard Network Features provide you with an enhanced Virtual Networking experience for a seamless and consistent experience along with securit
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Virtual Network, ExpressRoute, Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

App Service multi plan subnet join

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 08:15:02 Z

Virtual network integration in App Service previously required one subnet per App Service plan integration. If you are working with many App Service plans, managing the subnets can be an unnecessary administrative task. Therefore, we are happy to announce
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Virtual Network, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

App Service multi plan subnet join

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:30:29 Z

Public Preview: Edit network features for Azure NetApp Files with no downtime

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files now supports the capability to edit network features of existing volumes with no downtime.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: App Service multi plan subnet join

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

New ability for apps from multiple App Service plans to integrate with the same subnet
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Virtual Network, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Exploring SUSE Enterprise Linux on Azure

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 17:34:44 Z

Exploring SUSE Enterprise Linux on Azure In today's cloud-centric world, leveraging robust and reliable operating systems is crucial for businesses. One such powerful combination is SUSE Enterprise Linux on Azure. This blog delves into the various aspects of using SUSE Enterprise Linux, particularly the High Availability (HA) extension, on Azure. SUSE Distributions Supported on Azure Azure supports several SUSE distributions, including: SUSE Enterprise Linux Server SUSE Enterprise Linux Server for SAP SUSE Enterprise Linux Server for HPC For more details: click here. Pricing and Licensing Models SUSE has three offerings in Azure: BYOS SUSE Image with patching support 24x7 support When it comes to pricing, the Azure pricing calculator provides various options. For instance, for a B2as machine with SUSE Linux Enterprise + 24/7 Support, PAYG, the cost is approximately $47.45 per month as of writing this blog. You can select the desired image during the installation, and the Azure marketplace provides detailed information on what is offered under each SUSE image deployed through the marketplace. High Availability Extension The High Availability extension is a critical component for businesses that require continuous uptime and disaster recovery solutions. If you purchase the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP, the High Availability extension is included. However, if you opt for the standard SUSE Linux Enterprise Server through the Azure marketplace, you cannot add the High Availability extension. In such cases, you will need to use the BYOS (Bring Your Own Subscription) model. Key Features of SUSE Enterprise Linux for SAP SUSE Enterprise Linux for SAP comes with several features designed to enhance performance and reliability, including: A full High Availability / Disaster Recovery solution SAP HANA System Replication automation agents SAP HANA Firewall with automated setup A KMIP-compliant key server for remote storage SAP configuration and tuning
Update Type: Announcement, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure App Configuration – Premium pricing plan now generally available

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

The Premium tier for Azure App Configuration is now generally available, making it possible to support larger and more complex applications with higher performance and scalability.This new pricing plan is ideal for organizations that need greater capacity
Update Type: GA, Services: App Configuration, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution: now Generally Available

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:30:00 Z

Have you been looking to expand your storage on Azure VMware Solution (AVS), but do not need the extra compute performance and the associated costs that come with adding more nodes? Are you looking for a more cost-efficient alternative storage solution that is easy to set up and manage? If so, you will be as excited as we are to learn about the general availability of Azure Elastic SAN for AVS – out today! Using Azure Elastic SAN to expand your storage Azure Elastic SAN is Azure’s latest addition to our family of block storage products, unique in part because of its support for remote block storage (iSCSI) and cost-efficient provisioning model for deployment at scale. Because Azure VMware Solution supports attaching iSCSI datastores as a persistent storage option, you can create Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores with Azure Elastic SAN volumes and attach them to clusters of your choice. By using VMFS datastores backed by Azure Elastic SAN, you can expand your storage with an Azure deployed, fully-managed and VMware Certified storage area network instead of scaling the clusters. With this integration, we add an important tool for optimizing workloads, whether they are large-scale databases requiring high storage capacity, or performance-intensive, mission-critical applications. Not every application requires the performance of directly attached storage, and many workloads, like backup and disaster recovery use cases or other capacity intensive workloads, can benefit from a more cost-efficient extensible storage solution. Azure Elastic SAN can be deployed and connected straight from the Azure portal, and at $0.06-0.08 per GiB per month (based on current pricing in East US), it is the cheapest per GiB storage option for AVS, while still offering scalable performance for a variety of use cases. How to optimize price-performance with Azure Elastic SAN When setting up an Elastic SAN, you create a pool of resources that is shared among the “volumes” withi
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Elastic SAN, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

Azure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is now generally available. Azure Elastic SAN offers AVS customers an Azure deployed, fully managed, VMware Certified storage area network (SAN) that can achieve massive scale, is easy to manage, and has r
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Elastic SAN, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based Virtual Machines

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the new Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machines (VMs). The Cobalt 100 VMs consist of our new general purpose Dpsv6-series and Dplsv6-series and our memory optimized Epsv6-series VM series. They offer up to
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Reduced Pricing for JBoss EAP on App Service

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

Announcing Reduced Pricing for JBoss EAP on App Service starting October 1, 2024!Price ReductionAcross all available non-free SKUs, JBoss EAP License fees have been reduced by 63%! This reduction in license fees makes JBoss EAP on App Service more accessi
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

VM watch for Azure VMs

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

Public Preview: VM watch – Enhancing VM Health Monitoring VM watch, now in preview, is a standardized, lightweight, and adaptable in-VM service offering for virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets. It runs health checks within the VM at configurab
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based Virtual Machines

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs are now generally available in over 20 regions in North America, Asia, and EMEA.
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: VM watch for Azure VMs

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

VM watch makes it easier to collect and transmit health signals from virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Reduced Pricing for JBoss EAP on App Service

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

Reduced pricing now available for JBoss EAP on App Service!
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Elastic SAN is now generally available as a VMware Certified datastore for Azure VMware Solution (AVS). Elastic SAN offers the cheapest per GiB storage for AVS, so you can optimize your storage and lower your costs.
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Elastic SAN, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

App Service Environment memory intensive pricing tier

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

Not all workloads in the cloud need the same resources, which is why organizations regularly optimize their architecture with a mix of technologies and service plans that best meet their current needs. To meet this need for varied workload sizes, we’ve de
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Older versions of EA Azure Price Sheet – Download by Billing Account API

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

All versions of the Azure Price Sheet - Download by Billing Account API prior to version 2023-09-01 (including 2022-06-01, 2021-10-01, 2020-01-01-preview, 2019-10-01, 2019-05-01) are scheduled to be retired on June 1, 2026. Please transition to Azure Pric
Update Type: Deprecation, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Retirement: Older versions of EA Azure Price Sheet – Download by Billing Account API

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

All versions of the EA Azure Price Sheet - Download by Billing Account API prior to version 2023-09-01 will be retired on June 1, 2026. Please migrate to version 2023-11-01 to take advantage of the newer and enhanced price sheet.
Update Type: Deprecation, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: App Service Environment memory intensive pricing tier

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

New cost-effective solution for apps that need more memory resources without extra cores on Azure App Service Environment v3.
Update Type: GA, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing Text PII Redaction Container Release

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 17:04:19 Z

We are excited to announce the container support for pre-built Text PII services for redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This release allows customers with stringent security and privacy requirements to detect and redact PII entities from text locally, ensuring that user data is secure and private. This release includes both connected and disconnected container options, with the connected container offering both Pay as You Go and Commitment Tier pricing options and the disconnected container providing Commitment Tier pricing, allowing long-term customers to also benefit from cost savings based on their commitment. Learn more about our pricing options on our pricing page. The Text PII container also supports over 70 languages and additional support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai are in progress. This update provides a new option for our customers to redact PII in a secured on-premises environment and is one of several PII detection offerings in Azure AI Language. In the Azure-hosted service, Azure AI Language also offers PII detection optimized for speech-to-text transcripts (Conversational PII service) and native documents (Native Document PII service). Conversational PII provides better support for inputs like transcripts, chats, and other text written in a conversational style (i.e. text with “um”s, “ah”s, multiple speakers, and the spelling out of words for more clarity). We will be adding more of these capabilities to be supported by PII containers in the future based on customers' needs. These services enable our customers to adhere to the highest standards of data privacy, security, and compliance in scenarios such as anonymizing user data from customer support calls, from legal documents, or before sending it to LLMs, helping protect an individual’s identity and privacy in both generative and non-generative AI applications which are critical for highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare or government. To
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Integration Services Quarterly Highlights and Insights: 2024’Q3

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 18:04:36 Z

As we close the third quarter of 2024, we’re thrilled to share some exciting updates about Azure Integration Services! This quarter has been monumental, celebrating a decade of Azure API Management while introducing groundbreaking features that empower our customers to innovate faster, secure their digital ecosystems, and simplify complex integrations. Celebrating 10 Years of Azure API Management September marked a significant milestone—Azure API Management turned 10! Since its launch in 2014, it has transformed how businesses connect, scale, and secure their digital landscapes. Today, over 35,000 customers rely on Azure API Management, managing nearly 2 million APIs and processing over 2 trillion API requests monthly. InfoWorld's latest article captures the essence of our journey over the past decade, showcasing how customer-driven innovation has been at the heart of everything we do. From offering greater policy flexibility and competitive pricing plans to embracing hybrid environments and advancing security, we've continuously evolved to meet the needs of modern businesses. And now, with game-changing capabilities like the GenAI Gateway, we're just getting started! As we celebrate 10 years of Azure API Management, we’re looking forward to shaping the future of API innovation. Dive into our story and what's next here. Product Announcements Azure Logic Apps continues to elevate its integration capabilities with a suite of exciting updates. From enabling efficient data ingestion for generative AI applications to offering powerful templates for quicker workflow creation, these new features empower developers to build, manage, and scale their solutions with ease. The integration with the Semantic Kernel enhances natural language processing capabilities, while new monitoring dashboards provide improved oversight and performance insights. Whether automating workflows, managing complex integrations, or leveraging AI, these rece
Update Type: Announcement, Services: API Management, Logic Apps, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Backup- Reduced Protected Instance Fee for SAP HANA Backup

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

We are thrilled to announce a significant update that will bring enhanced cost efficiency to our SAP HANA Database Backup service. Starting September 1, 2024, we are reducing the Protected Instance (PI) fees for "Azure Backup for SAP HANA on Azure VM." Th
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Backup, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Save up to 56% on the latest Linux VMs in most Azure regions for a limited time

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 07:00:00 Z

We are excited to announce the promotional offer for the latest Linux VMs in Azure. You can save 15 % in addition to the existing one-year Azure Reserved Virtual Machine (VM) Instances discount for latest Linux VMs for a limited period. This means you cou
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Save up to 56% on the latest Linux VMs in most Azure regions for a limited time

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 Z

Save an additional 15% discount on 1-year Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instance rates for the latest Linux VMs. Offer valid from October 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

ExpressRoute Metro is now generally available!!

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 21:16:52 Z

We are excited to announce general availability of ExpressRoute Metro, a new private connectivity architecture designed to enhance network resiliency for our customers. ExpressRoute Metro provides a highly resilient circuit that enables diverse connections to two separate edge sites within a city, ensuring increased redundancy and reliability. With Metro Provider and Metro Direct, customers can benefit from enhanced redundancy across the circuit and port infrastructure, while also gaining an additional layer of resiliency at the edge site level. This solution is engineered to maintain robust connectivity in case of site-wide disruptions, ensuring uninterrupted service and business continuity. Key Highlights: Enhanced Resiliency: Dual-homed connections across two distinct edge sites offer improved resiliency. Locations Coverage: Metro is currently available in Amsterdam, Singapore and Zurich with more locations including Atlanta, Milan, Madrid, Chicago, and Dublin, scheduled to go live in coming months. Simple Setup: The setup process is designed for simplicity and ease of configuration, featuring a guided portal that provides clear navigational support. Learn more about ExpressRoute Metro here. For Pricing, please refer here.
Update Type: GA, Services: ExpressRoute, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing Reduced Pricing for JBoss EAP on App Service

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 16:00:00 Z

Announcing Reduced Pricing for JBoss EAP on App Service starting today, October 1, 2024! Price Reduction Across all available SKUs, JBoss EAP License fees have been reduced by 63%! Check it out on the Azure Pricing Page for JBoss EAP on App Service. Learn more about JBoss EAP on App Service: Deploy and configure Tomcat, JBoss, or Java SE apps - Azure App Service | Microsoft Learn Migrating your JBoss EAP Apps to Azure App Service JBoss EAP on App Service Free and Memory Optimized Plans Advanced Clustering Features for JBoss EAP on App Service
Update Type: Announcement, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

New FX series VMs - FXmsv2 and FXmdsv2

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 07:00:00 Z

Azure is proud to announce newest additions to the FX subfamily of VMs, the FXmsv2 FXmdsv2 series, powered by the 5th Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8473C (Emerald Rapids) processor in a hyper threaded configuration, ideal for memory and compute intensi
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 07:00:00 Z

We are announcing the general availability of Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and inviting customers to start deploying their production GPU workloads on these VMs. This NCC H100 v5 VM SKU is based on AMD 4th Gen EPYCTM processors
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: New FX series VMs - FXmsv2 and FXmdsv2

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 Z

The FXmsv2 and FXmdsv2 series are newest additions to the FX subfamily of VMs.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Access-based enumeration and non-browsable shares for SMB and dual-protocol Azure NetApp Files volumes

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:00:00 Z

In environments with Azure NetApp Files volumes that are shared among multiple departments, projects and users, users can see the existence of other files and folders in directory listings even if they do not have permissions to access those items. Enabli
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure NetApp Files Reserved Capacity

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:00:00 Z

Pay-as-you-go pricing is the most convenient way to purchase cloud storage when your workloads are dynamic or changing over time. However, some workloads are more predictable with stable capacity usage over an extended period and can benefit from savings
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Advanced Container Networking Services: Enhancing security and observability in AKS

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:00:00 Z

Advanced Container Networking Service offers advanced security feature, FQDN filtering. FQDN filtering allows you to define granular network policies based on domain names rather than IP addresses. This simplifies policy management, reduces administrative
Update Type: Preview, Services: Kubernetes Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Backup-SAP HANA DB Backup Delivers More Value at Lower TCO with Reduced Protected Instance Fee

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 06:45:05 Z

Azure Backup for SAP HANA Database Delivers More Value at Lower TCO with Reduced Protected Instance Fees starting 1st Sept’2024 At Azure, our commitment to providing superior value to our customers is unwavering. We are thrilled to announce a significant update that will bring enhanced cost efficiency to our SAP HANA Database Backup service. Starting September 1, 2024, we are reducing the Protected Instance (PI) fees for "Azure Backup for SAP HANA on Azure VM." This change is designed to deliver more value at a lower cost, making it easier for enterprises to protect their critical data without compromising on quality or performance. New Pricing Structure: More Value, Lower Cost With the new Protected Instance (PI) fee structure effective 1st September 2024, both SAP HANA Streaming/Backint-based backups and SAP HANA Snapshot-based backups will see reduced costs. Here’s how the new pricing breaks down: HANA Backint/Streaming Backup HANA Snapshot Backup DB Size Old pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) New pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) PI Cost Savings % DB Size Old pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) New pricing (Protected Instance Fee for East US2) PI Cost Savings % 500 GB $80 $80 No Change 1TB $160 $80 50% 1 TB $160 $80 50% 10 TB $1600 $160 90% 5TB $800 $80 90% 20 TB $3200 $320 90% 10 TB $1600 $80 95% 30 TB $4800 $480 90% HANA Streaming Backup: A flat rate of $80 (East US2) per instance, with standard regional uplift, regardless of the HANA database size. For example, if you are protecting 1.2 TB of HANA database in one instance running in the East US2 region, the New PI cost would be flat $80 (East US2 Region) per month. Previously, the cost would have been $240 + storage consumed. HANA Snapshot Backup: $80 (East US2) per 5 TB increment, with standard regional uplift. For example, if you have 10 TB of HANA database
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Backup, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Access-based enumeration and non-browsable shares for SMB and dual-protocol Azure NetApp Files volumes

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 Z

Access-based enumeration and non-browsable shares for SMB and dual-protocol volumes in Azure NetApp Files is now generally available
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure NetApp Files Reserved Capacity

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 Z

Cost savings and improved financial predictability with Azure NetApp Files Reserved Capacity
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: Advanced Container Networking Services: Enhancing security and observability in AKS

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 Z

Microsoft’s Azure container Networking team is announcing availability of FQDN filtering and HA DNS proxy within Advanced Container Networking Services on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). These new features provide a robust and secure solution for managing network traffic in containerized environments.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Kubernetes Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Durable Functions: FaaS for Stateful Logic and Complex Workflows

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 21:33:54 Z

Function as a Service (FaaS) helps developers work better by offering a fast, scalable way to execute a task in response to an event without the need to manage infrastructure. A function transforms input to output, making it a lightweight choice for scheduled tasks, reminders, order processing and other actions that don’t require fault tolerance more complex than simple retries. Plus, functions run on a cloud host’s infrastructure, scaling in and out on demand, and you only pay for the resources you consume. But what if you have workflows that need more reliability and fault tolerance than a short-lived function provides? What if your scenario includes longer-running tasks or your business logic needs the output of one function as the input to another? That’s when you need solutions designed to orchestrate higher-level workflows. However, you don’t have to give up the ease of FaaS. Traditionally when developers orchestrated complex stateful logic or workflows, they used databases and queues to help track application states. Whether using a traditional infrastructure or cloud services, this approach requires you to write, test and manage scalable logic to check point and manage states, handle retries and recover from failures. Message queues offer a level of durability by decoupling downstream users from the source data. But managing this extra infrastructure — and the intricate logic around it to achieve fault tolerance — adds time and complexity. By comparison, you can use Azure Durable Functions to take care of the details for you, including state tracking, automatic retries, recovery from failure and load balancing tasks. You can focus on the business logic while getting the added benefits of a managed infrastructure, automatic scaling and pay-per-use pricing. Durable Functions gives you the best of both worlds by extending the FaaS benefits of the Azure Functions platform. In essence, you can write code to build complex, s
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure Functions, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Storage Mover with Bandwidth Management

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 07:00:00 Z

Azure Storage Mover now supports setting bandwidth management schedules for your Storage Mover agents to optimize your file migrations and ensuring a smooth network performance. This feature helps Storage Mover agents act as a good neighbor in your on-pre
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Storage, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure Storage Mover with Bandwidth Management

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Storage Mover with WAN link bandwidth management schedules is now generally available.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Storage, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing Public Preview of Instance Mix on Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 16:47:34 Z

Today, we’re excited to announce that the ability to specify multiple different VM sizes in your Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) with Flexible Orchestration Mode with Instance Mix. This new capability allows you to specify up to five different VM sizes to use in your VMSS deployments. Not only does this simplify the management of your scale sets, but it also allows you to optimize your deployments for either price or capacity through allocation strategies. Benefits Single API call: In one API call, you can specify and deploy up to five VM sizes in your scale sets. Optimized deployments: You can optimize for the available capacity in Azure regions/zones with CapacityOptimized for more confidence that you’ll get the capacity requested. For cost-sensitive customers who want to still utilize capacity signals, the LowestPrice allocation strategy takes both factors into account. Automated allocation: By using allocation strategies, let Azure determine which of the specified VMs are most readily available and most cost efficient. Easily scale with a mix of VM offerings: When using Spot Priority Mix, you can deploy a heterogeneous mix of VM sizes of both Spot and On-Demand pricing in your scale sets. Simplified management: You can now have the scale set deploy multiple different VM sizes, as opposed to manually deploying different VMs into the scale set. Attain needed capacity: By utilizing a diversified mix of VM sizes, you can tap into a greater pool of capacity, increasing your ability to get the capacity you need. What’s new VMSS Instance Mix introduces a few new properties to the VMSS API including: skuProfile: an umbrella property for the list of vmSizes and allocationStrategy. vmSizes: the list of VM sizes to be deployed. allocationStrategy: the property specify their allocation strategy. There are currently two options, LowestPrice and CapacityOptimized LowestPrice: when evaluating what VM size split to use, Azure will first look at the lowest priced VM
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, VM Scale Sets, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure NetApp Files storage with cool access for all service levels

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 07:00:00 Z

With the general availability of cool access feature, your standard service level capacity pools in addition to volumes created in premium and ultra service level capacity pools can transparently store data more cost-effectively on Azure storage accounts
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure NetApp Files storage with cool access for all service levels

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files storage with cool access is now generally available with support for all service levels.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure AI Document Intelligence now previewing field extraction with Generative AI and more

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 12:30:00 Z

Azure AI Document Intelligence is an AI service that provides you with a simple set of APIs and a studio experience to effectively extract content, structure like tables, paragraphs sections and figures, and fields, predefined for specific document types or custom fields for any document or form. With the Document Intelligence APIs, you can effectively split, classify, extract fields or content from any document or form at scale. Document Intelligence continues to provide more value for your document processing needs. We recently announced a reduction in price for the custom extraction model from $50/1000 pages to $30/1000 pages, we also lowered the price for commitment tiers for volume discounts. Learn more about these pricing changes and how you can maximize your value from using Document Intelligence. We now have a new preview API in public preview that adds new value with new and improved features! Document field extraction with Generative AI Document processing with Generative AI typically involves the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pattern for tasks like field extraction. Managing the complexities of RAG like chunking and vectorizing documents, building and managing a search index and prompt tuning are now no longer needed for the field extraction task! With the new custom field extraction capability, simply define your schema, allow the model to extract the fields you need. The Generative AI based model provides a simplified experience with tools to improve the predicted results with corrections, if needed. Once you have a model built, you can then integrate the model into your document processing workflows. Model outputs include grounded results and confidence scores, providing the guardrails to ensure the extracted values align with your business scenario and existing tools and processes. Try out the new Generative AI based field extraction model in the AI Studio today. Follow the quickstart to build a model for any of your documents. This
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Double encryption at-rest for Azure NetApp Files

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 07:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files double encryption at-rest feature now provides multiple independent encryption layers, protecting against attacks to any single encryption layer.Threats are diminished to the encrypted data, for example: Single encryption key being comp
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: Azure NetApp Files now supports 50 GiB minimum volume sizes

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Volume enhancement: Azure NetApp Files now supports 50 GiB minimum volume sizes.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Double encryption at-rest for Azure NetApp Files

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Multiple encryption layers for increased data security.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Unveiling Azure OpenAI Service Provisioned Reservations and hourly pricing

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 18:00:01 Z

Introduction Microsoft recently launched Azure Essentials to provide guidance for managing your cloud investments efficiently by choosing the pricing offers that best meet your needs, paying only for what you use, and managing your cloud spend as your business evolves, whether you’re migrating your first workload or optimizing complex deployments. In alignment with the launch of Azure Essentials, the Microsoft team is thrilled to announce meaningful changes to provisioned deployments for Azure OpenAI Service. My name is Roman, I am part of the AI global black belt and it’s an absolute pleasure to share some of these changes with you today. Starting today, we are rolling out several updates that are going to change the way you procure and deploy Provisioned Throughput Units. These changes are designed to help you be more agile, faster to market and more cost effective. The changes unveiled today only pertain to the provisioned deployments purchasing process. The technical value proposition is still the same and provisioned deployments remain the best option for real-time and high throughput applications. Today we are announcing: Self-service provisioning and model independent quota requests Visibility to service capacity and availability Provisioned hourly pricing and provisioned reservations This blog post will focus on the last point and will delve into Azure Reservations for Provisioned Deployments. To learn more about all these changes, visit this link. Late summer 2023, Microsoft launched Provisioned Throughput Units for Azure Open AI Service. This was, and still is, a way for customers to request a specified amount of computational power in the Azure OpenAI Service and solve the challenges related to the "noisy neighbor” problem presented with AI computing in a public cloud. In contrast with the regional standard and global-standard deployments, provisioned deployments allow customers to create a deployment with a guaranteed measure of capacity; as a resul
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure NetApp Files cross-zone replication

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Replicate Azure NetApp Files volumes from one availability zone to another in a fast and cost-effective way, protecting your data from unforeseeable zone failures
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Azure NetApp Files zone volume placement enhancement – Populate existing volume

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Populate previously deployed, existing volumes with the logical availability zone information to enable failure domain protection for workloads in specific availability zones.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing Azure OpenAI Global Batch Offering: Efficient processing at scale with 50% less cost

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:41:00 Z

We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure OpenAI Global Batch offering, designed to handle large-scale and high-volume processing tasks efficiently. Process asynchronous groups of requests with separate quota, with target 24-hour turnaround time, at 50% less cost than global standard. This is a quote from our customer:  "Ontada is at the unique position of serving providers, patients and life science partners with data-driven insights. We leverage the Azure OpenAI batch API to process tens of millions of unstructured documents efficiently, enhancing our ability to extract valuable clinical information. What would have taken months to process now takes just a week. This significantly improves evidence-based medicine practice and accelerates life science product R&D. Partnering with Microsoft, we are advancing AI-driven oncology research, aiming for breakthroughs in personalized cancer care and drug development." Sagran Moodley, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer, Ontada Why Azure OpenAI Global Batch? Cost Efficiency: 50% reduction in cost compared to global standard pricing. Separate Quota: Manage batch requests with an independent enqueued token quota, ensuring that your online workloads are unaffected. Batch quota is substantially high. Learn more. 24-Hour Turnaround: Our aim is to process batch requests within 24 hours, ensuring timely results for your usecases. Supported Models The following models currently support the global batch: Model Supported Versions gpt4-o 2024-05-13 gpt-4o-mini coming soon gpt-4 turbo-2024-04-09 gpt-4 0613 gpt-35-turbo 0125 gpt-35-turbo 1106 gpt-35-turbo 0613 For the most up-to-date information on regions and models, please refer to our models page. Key Use Cases The Azure OpenAI Batch API opens up new possibilities across various industries and applications: Large-Scale Data Processing: Quickly analyze extensive datasets in parallel, enabling faste
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing lower pricing for Azure App Service Premium P0v3 to help build and modernize AI apps

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 12:00:00 Z

Azure App Service team is excited to announce that the entry-level Premium plan known as P0v3 is now available at a significantly lower price, making it even more convenient and affordable to get started in your AI apps journey using your favorite platform-as-a-service. There is no change in price of other Azure App Service Premium plans. How much can you save with Premium v3? Premium v3 is the latest generation of Azure App Service that offers high performance, high scalability, and high reliability as a multi-tenant managed service. Unlike previous generation plans such as Premium v2 or Standard, Premium v3 plans include commitment-based savings over one and three years that significantly lower the monthly bills, while delivering more powerful compute resources. Azure savings plans and reserved instance (RI) pricing—only available on the Premium v3 and Isolated v2 tiers—provide up to 55 percent more savings compared to the pay-as-you-go plan. In just over a year since its release, the P0v3 plan with a single core, 4GB RAM, and 250GB included storage has quickly become one of the fastest growing consumption plans in Azure App Service. With this price drop, you have another compelling reason to accelerate your ambitions to build and modernize AI apps on Azure. Figure 1 Snapshot of Premium v3 monthly pricing for US East region on Linux after the price drop Why are we making this change now? We hear from IT leaders and decision makers that the evolution of GenAI has accelerated App Modernization momentum across companies of all sizes and cloud maturity levels. A recently commissioned study by IDC, “Exploring the Benefits of Cloud Migration and Modernization for the Development of Intelligent Applications,” based on interviews with 900 IT leaders worldwide, revealed that what set them up for success in the AI era was the fact that they had already begun modernizing their app infrastructure on Azure. Generative AI mo
Update Type: Announcement, Services: App Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini Now Available in API with Vision and Fine-tuning Text Capabilities on Azure AI

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:35:04 Z

We recently launched OpenAI’s fastest model, GPT-4o mini, in the Azure OpenAI Studio Playground, simultaneously with OpenAI. The response from our customers has been phenomenal. Today, we are excited to bring this powerful model to even more developers by releasing the GPT-4o mini API with vision support for Global and East US Regional Standard Deployments. From Playground to API: Expanding Accessibility Launching GPT-4o mini in the Azure OpenAI Studio Playground provided our customers with the opportunity to experiment and innovate with the latest AI technology. Now, by extending its availability to the API with global and regional pricing, we are empowering developers to seamlessly integrate GPT-4o mini into their applications, leveraging its incredible speed and versatility for a wide range of tasks. Unlocking New Possibilities with Vision and Text Capabilities With the addition of vision input capabilities, GPT-4o mini expands its versatility and opens new horizons for developers and businesses. This enhancement allows users to process and analyze visual data, extracting valuable insights and generating comprehensive text outputs. Whether it's interpreting images or processing documents, GPT-4o mini is designed to handle a wide range of tasks and use cases efficiently. Flexible Pricing: Regional and Global Options GPT4o-mini is available for Global Standard deployments in all regions and Standard Regional deployments in East US, with more regions coming soon. Operating costs can vary significantly across different regions due to factors such as data center expenses and local costs for renewable energy. Additionally, the strict compliance and residency requirements offered by Azure necessitate increased infrastructure investments. To provide our customers with the best possible price while maintaining high standards, we are introducing price tiers for regional Standard and Global Standard for GPT-4o mini. Global Standard provides the lowest price with the hig
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Azure AI Foundry, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: Azure NetApp Files volume encryption key transition

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 Z

Customers can now transition existing volumes from platform-managed keys (PMK) to customer-managed keys (CMK) without data migration
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini Now Available in API with Vision Capabilities on Azure AI

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 22:03:39 Z

Public Preview: Azure NetApp Files large volume enhancement – increased throughput and maximum size limit of 2 PiB volume

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files large volumes now support throughput up to 12.5-GiB/s and maximum volume size up to 2 PiB.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Save Big on Hosting Your Fine-Tuned Models on Azure OpenAI Service

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 19:54:37 Z

We've heard your feedback loud and clear: folks want to fine tune their models, but the pricing can make experimentation too expensive. Following our update last month to switch to token based billing for training, we're reducing the hosting charges for many of your favorite models! Starting from July 1, we have reduced the hosting charges for many Azure OpenAI Service fine-tuned models, including our most popular models - the GPT-35-Turbo family. For folks less familiar with our service, models need to be deployed before they can be used for inferencing – and when deployed, we charge an hourly rate for hosting models. Don't need to use your model right away? We store up to 100 non-deployed fine tuned models per resource, for free! The new prices are published on the Azure OpenAI Service Pricing page, and listed below: Base Model Previous Price New Price (Effective July 1, 2024) Babbage-002 $1.70 / hour $1.70 / hour Davinci-002 $2.00 / hour $1.70 / hour (15% off) GPT-35-Turbo (4K) $3.00 / hour $1.70 / hour (43% off) GPT-35-Turbo (16K) $3.00 / hour $1.70 / hour (43% off) Why do we charge for hosting? When you deploy a fine tune model, you're covered by the same Azure OpenAI SLAs as our base models, with 99.9% uptime, and hosted continuously on Azure infrastructure rather than being loaded on demand. This means that once your model is deployed, there's no wait for inferencing. And, because you're paying for your deployment, we charge a relatively low price for inferencing (the same as the equivalent base model). When comparing different services, you can consider the tradeoff between a fixed price for hosting and a higher per-token rate for inferencing. Because Azure OpenAI has a fixed hosting cost and low inferencing charges, for heavier inferencing workloads it may be much cheaper comp
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Unlock Unprecedented Value with Azure AI Document Intelligence Custom Extraction, now 40% Less!

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 15:26:13 Z

Revolutionizing Document Processing for Your Business At Azure AI, we continuously strive to empower businesses with cutting-edge technology at the most competitive prices. We are thrilled to announce that as of June 1st, the pricing of our custom extraction models, a key capability of Azure AI Document Intelligence is significantly reduced. With a 40% price drop, we are making it easier and more affordable for you to leverage the full potential of AI-driven document processing. Custom Extraction With Azure AI Document Intelligence, you can use pre-built models or build your own custom models to analyze and extract key information and insights from your documents, such as names, dates, amounts, addresses, signatures, and more. Custom Extraction allows you to build your own custom models to extract defined schema from your documents. With the Custom Extraction model, you can use the Document Intelligence Studio or the REST API to define the fields and label the values that you want to extract from your documents and train your model starting with just one sample document. Once the model is trained, you can use it to analyze new documents and get the extracted data in JSON format or use Document Intelligence SDK to get the analyzed result. Custom Extraction is ideal for scenarios where you have documents that are not supported by the pre-built models, or where you have specific business requirements that need custom logic or validation. Discover New Pricing We are excited to announce that we have reduced the price of the Custom Extraction model by 40%, from $50/1,000 pages to $30/1,000 pages. The new pricing is effective from June 1st, 2024, and applies to all regions where the Custom Extraction model is available. Commitment Tiers for Even Greater Savings - In addition to the price reduction, we are also offering lower prices for commitment tiers. By pre-committing to a specific capacity, you can enjoy even greater savings. This flexi
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs offering 400K IOPS and 10GBps throughput now generally available

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 20:24:00 Z

In September 2023, we announced the Public Preview of NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs offering 400K IOPS and 10GBps throughput Virtual Machine (VM) sizes based on the 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C processor offering higher remote storage performance with Azure Disks. The Ebsv5 VM family is designed for memory-intensive business-critical applications, relational database servers, and in-memory data analytics workloads. Today, we are announcing the general availability (GA) of accelerated remote storage performance using Azure Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disk within the existing NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 family. The higher storage performance is offered across all Ebsv5 sizes and delivers up to 400K IOPS (I/O operations per second) and 10GBps of remote disk storage throughput. This general availability of accelerated NVMe-Ebsv5 with increased remote storage performance is part of the Azure Boost family which upgrades the fleet with these new capabilities. The NVMe enabled Ebsv5 sizes offer up to 2x the performance of SCSI VM sizes with no additional cost, providing better price-performance. The VM pricing details are available here. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 NVMe VM series In today's competitive business landscape, quickly processing, analyzing, and extracting insights from large volumes of data is essential. OLTP and OLAP applications, which handle real-time transactions, further highlight the need for powerful computing and storage solutions. Companies must adopt robust systems to manage increasing data demands efficiently while keeping costs in check. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM family with NVMe, made generally available in May 2023, meets the performance requirements for many business-critical applications. However, some workloads require even higher VM-to-disk throughput and IOPS performance over Ultra or Premium SSD v2 disk options, which are now served by the accelerated NVMe Ebsv5 VM sizes. Ebsv5 series NVMe VM specifications The E2-11
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Managed Disks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Run your Databricks jobs with serverless compute for workflows

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Users can now run their Azure Databricks job without configuring and deploying infrastructure.
Update Type: GA, Services: Databricks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: Interactive Serverless Compute

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Serverless compute for notebooks allows you to run your notebooks quickly without configuring and deploying infrastructure.
Update Type: GA, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Generally Available: DLT with serverless compute

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200

DLT with serverless compute allows you to run your streaming data pipelines without configuring and deploying infrastructure.
Update Type: GA, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure pricing: How to calculate costs of Azure products and services

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 15:23:09 Z

In our previous blogs we explained the Azure pricing structure and how customers can estimate their project costs when migrating to Azure or building a cloud-native application. We introduced readers to Azure Migrate, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator, pay-as-you-go account, and the Azure Architecture Center. Now we will go a step further to address the needs of a customer who has decided to migrate their workloads or deploy cloud-native solutions and wants to budget for the specific Azure services they’ll be using. We will continue using the example of our digital media company, Contoso, and how they use Azure services to feel confident they’re getting the best value at every stage of their cloud journey. Discovering Azure pricing tools With a clear picture of the solutions they want to migrate, the Azure services (like Azure OpenAI Service) to employ, and the involved costs, Contoso is ready to finalize their monthly budget. It is important for the digital media company to only pay for what they need, and they are able to maximize their cloud spending by leveraging Azure’s pricing tools and benefits. First, the Azure pricing calculator allowed Contoso to calculate their monthly and hourly cost for each cloud service before deployment. This interactive tool tailored estimates based on the Azure services they plan to use, estimated usage quantities, and their region. They know, for example, that their OpenAI chatbot will be running E4v5 VMs on West U.S., 24 hours a day for at least 1 year, so they purchase Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances to save roughly 40% on their compute cost*. They also knew that they will consistently be running a standard series 8 vCore provisioned compute size for Azure SQL Standard-series (Gen5) General Purpose in Sweden Central, so they purchased Azure Reservations to save roughly 35% compared to pay-as-you-go*. Committing to a set number of high-performance resources for a one-year term secur
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Virtual Machines, SQL Database, Azure Migrate, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Pricing: How to estimate Azure project costs

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:09:07 Z

In the previous blog we explained how you can learn about Azure pricing with free services and a pay-as-you-go model. Next, lets understand how you can calculate your project costs when migrating or building a new solution in Azure. We will continue to use the example of Contoso, a hypothetical digital media company, and how they use Azure pricing resources to guide their migration to the cloud. Accurately Estimate Total Cost of Ownership Now that Contoso has a better understanding of how Azure pricing works, they need to confirm what solutions they want to migrate. This involves understanding their current infrastructure and applications, defining their goals and requirements, and estimating their project costs on Azure. Through collaboration and internal alignment, the dev team decided to migrate their media content delivery application and their Data Analytics and Business Intelligence solution. They also decided to build an OpenAI chatbot application in Azure. Azure provides different tools to help you estimate costs before migrating to the cloud. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator lets you compare costs for running an on-premises infrastructure to an Azure Cloud infrastructure. You enter your current infrastructure configuration (ex: number of servers, storage, storage costs, etc.) and the TCO calculator will compare those costs to anticipated costs when running on Azure. Customers can also leverage Azure Migrate which provides a simplified migration, modernization, and optimization service for Azure. All pre-migration steps such as discovery, assessments, and right-sizing of on-premises resources are included for infrastructure, data, and applications. For their migration project Contoso decided to use Azure Migrate to take advantage of the business case capability. This capability builds a business proposal that includes data such as on-premises vs. Azure total cost of ownership, year on year cashflow analysis, and resource utilization based on
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Azure Migrate, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Pricing: How to navigate Azure pricing options and resources

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 15:08:15 Z

In this blog we discussed customer pricing needs and how they match different phases of the cloud journey, and we provided various tools and resources to help you with your cloud pricing questions. Now, we will dive deeper into how Azure pricing works and how you can learn more about it. We will use the example of Contoso, a hypothetical digital media company, to show how they use Azure pricing resources to guide their migration to the cloud. Consider the cloud through testing and learning Contoso is considering moving their on-premises environment to the cloud to meet their growing demand for content, expand their services globally, and reduce their operating costs. Before moving to the cloud, the company wants to learn how Azure pricing works. They need to build confidence and showcase the value of the cloud to their leadership to approve the migration project. To help gather information, their Dev team created an Azure account to test different free services and started to consume others using the Pay-as-you-go model. They learned that Azure spend falls under operational expenditure (OpEx) because it operates on a consumption-based model. With Azure, they only pay for the IT resources they use, and not for the physical infrastructure, electricity, security, or anything else associated with maintaining a datacenter. If they don’t use any IT resources this month, they don’t pay for them, and they can scale or stop using services at any time. This is comparable to how a household would pay for a utility service. Some factors that impact their cost include resource type, geography location, and amount consumed. The pay-as-you-go model is different than a commitment-based model such as Azure Reservations and Azure savings plan for compute. With a commitment-based model you pay for services upfront for a set amount of time in exchange for a lower price. Through testing, their dev team deployed and configured different virtual machines to test scalabl
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure pricing: How to optimize costs for your Azure workloads

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:22:00 Z

In our previous blogs we explained the Azure pricing structure, how customers can calculate their costs when migrating or building in Azure, and how they can budget for specific resources with the Azure pricing calculator, Azure Reservations, and Azure Hybrid Benefit. In this final installment of our blog series, we will discover how to optimize the value of your Azure investment. Through a mixture of optimization best practices and Azure tools, we will see how the digital media company Contoso maximizes their cloud spend to get more out of their workloads. Cost-effective tools and strategies to optimize Azure workloads In the fast-paced world of digital media, efficiency and cost optimization are paramount. With workloads spanning from high-performance video rendering to real-time data analytics, Contoso wants to make sure they are managing costs and ensuring optimal resource utilization. Fortunately, Microsoft provides a suite of tools and best practices to help businesses streamline their Azure workloads and maximize their ROI (returns on investment). Contoso starts by establishing a collaborative culture between their engineering, finance, and business teams, promoting data-driven decisions aligned with business objectives. This practice is called FinOps, an operational framework and cultural practice that brings together technology, processes, and people to maximize the value of cloud investments. Leveraging tools and services like Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, Azure Automation, and Azure Resource Optimization to implement FinOps best practices helps Contoso optimize their cloud investments in the following ways: Enforce consistent resource configurations Enforce policies for accountability and efficiency Automate operations Continuously optimize resource utilization based on workload demands To get deeper insight into their Azure spending, Contoso also relies on Microsoft Cost Management, our comprehensive solution which leverages t
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure Blueprints, Cost Management, Automation, Azure Policy, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Pricing Update: Token Based Billing for Fine Tuning Training

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 13:08:35 Z

We’re updating our billing for fine tuning with the Azure OpenAI Service to bill based on the number of tokens in your training file – instead of the total elapsed training time. Model Previous Price New Price Babbage-002 $34 / hour $0.0004/1K tokens Davinci-002 $40 / hour $0.006/1K tokens GPT-35-Turbo (4k) $45 / hour $0.008/1K tokens GPT-35-Turbo (16K) $68 / hour $0.008/1K tokens GPT-4 $102 / hour $0.080/1K tokens Why make this change? If you’ve fine-tuned before – or thought about it and decided against it – you may have struggled to estimate the cost. While it’s easy to guess relative time (longer files, more epochs take longer) there’s was no easy way to estimate an exact time. Now, it’s simple: count the number of tokens in your file, multiply that by the per token price, and the number of epochs and you’ve got a decent estimate for the overall costs. Note: the raw token count for your file may be higher than the actual token counts you’ll be charged for, so this is an estimate, not the actual value you will be billed. In practice, this change will be a substantial discount for some training runs. For example, I recently fine-tuned GPT-35-Turbo 0613 with a small (45k token) dataset over 3 epochs. With hourly billing, this job took 1.5 hours and cost me $67.50 -- but with the switch to token based billing, it costs just $1.08! The price difference isn’t quite as big for large files: I trained GPT-35-Turbo 0125 with a large file (2.2M tokens) for one epoch, taking 1 hour and 15 minutes, at a price of $85 when billed hourly – or ~$18 when based on tokens. Not sure how to count up the tokens in your file? Tools like OpenAI's tiktoken library make it super simple to specify your model and write a short script to count tokens in your training data. Alternatively, many IDEs support plug-ins to pr
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure AI Services, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General Availability: Azure NetApp Files backup

Wed, 29 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files backup expands the data protection capabilities of Azure NetApp Files by providing fully managed backup solution for long-term snapshot archive, recovery, and compliance.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Compute Fleet

Tue, 21 May 2024 16:26:27 Z

Today we are announcing the public preview of Azure Compute Fleet, a new service that allows you to manage and deploy thousands of virtual machines (across a mix of SKU’s, VM type, Availability Zones, and pricing models) with a single API call. Embracing the "Fire & Forget-it" model, we are introducing Compute Fleet to automate your deployment, management, and monitoring of virtual machines (VMs) without requiring intricate code frameworks. Tell us what you need, capacity and instance wise for Standard and Spot VM and Compute Fleet will create both Standard and Spot VMs from a customized SKU list, tailored to your workload requirements with the capability to maintain the Spot VM target capacity in the fleet. Compute Fleet allows you to accelerate your access to Azure’s compute capacity in a region by launching a combination of Standard and Spot VMs at the lowest price and highest availability. You can attain superior price-performance ratios by utilizing a blend of diverse pricing models, including Reserved Instances, Savings Plan, Spot, and Pay-As-You-Go (PYG) options. Deploying Compute Fleet with a pre-defined fleet allocation strategy, allows you to optimize your mix of VMs for capacity and cost efficiency or a balance of both. This will alleviate concerns about complexity associated with determining optimal VM pricing, available capacity, managing Spot evictions, and SKU availability. There will be many ways you can use this product, whether by running a stateless web-service, large batch jobs, a big data cluster or Continuous Integration pipeline. Workloads such as financial risk analysis, log processing or image rendering can benefit from the ability to run thousands of concurrent cores. Key Benefits Deploy up to 10,000 VMs Mix multiple VM types (Standard /Spot) Mix multiple Azure pricing models Mix multiple VM SKUs/sizes Expedite capacity access Hyperscale using Spot VMs Maintain Spot VM target capacity Optimize for price, capacity or both C
Update Type: Preview, Services: Compute Fleet, Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview - Azure Compute Fleet

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Compute Fleet is a game changer in scaling and optimizing Azure compute resources across different virtual machine (VM) types, availability zones, and pricing models to achieve desired scale, performance, and cost.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Compute Fleet, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: Azure Functions brings new flexibility with Azure Functions Flex Consumption

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Flex consumption is a new Azure Functions hosting plan that provides fast scaling and networking features with a serverless billing model.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure Functions, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: AKS Automatic

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

AKS Automatic clusters are optimized to run most production workloads and provision compute resources based on Kubernetes manifests. The streamlined configuration follows AKS best practices and recommendations for cluster and workload setup, scalability, and security.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Kubernetes Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Preview: Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based Virtual Machines

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs are now available in preview. Please use the sign-up form at https://aka.ms/Cobalt100-VM-Preview-Signup to request access.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Update on Inter-Availability Zone Data Transfer Pricing

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure will not charge for the data transfer across availability zones to help customers build more resilient and efficient applications on the cloud by leveraging availability zones. This will enable customers to leverage the benefits of zonal and zone-redundant services without extra costs for data transfer between availability zones.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Upcoming changes to Databricks materialized views and streaming tables in Databricks SQL

Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Databricks materialized views and streaming tables Billing change
Update Type: Preview, Services: Databricks, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General availability: ExpressRoute Seamless Gateway Migration

Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

ExpressRoute customers can now deploy a second gateway to the Gateway Subnet. This will enable a seamless migration to an Az-enabled Gateway SKU and upgrade your Public IP configurations.
Update Type: GA, Services: Virtual Network, ExpressRoute, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General Availability: Azure Files geo-redundancy for standard large file shares

Wed, 15 May 2024 01:04:36 Z

Azure Files is excited to announce that geo-redundancy for 100 TiB standard SMB file shares is now generally available, enabling customers to achieve higher resiliency for production scale workloads. We previously offered 100 TiB standard SMB shares for locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options but geo-redundant storage (GRS/GZRS) was limited to 5 TiB, restricting higher capacity and performance workloads from using this resiliency option. Geo-redundancy is critical to ensure high availability and to meet various compliance and regulatory requirements for your production workloads (for example, line-of-business (LOB) applications). Geo-redundant storage asynchronously replicates to a secondary region enabling you to failover to the secondary region, if the primary region becomes unavailable. You don't have to compromise on performance and scale or geo-redundancy for your SMB file shares anymore! All standard SMB file shares that are geo-redundant (both new and existing) can now scale up to 100TiB capacity and have much higher performance limits: Azure Files (GRS and GZRS file shares) Previous limits New limits Capacity per share 5 TiB 100 TiB (20x increase) Max IOPS per share 1,000 IOPS Up to storage account limit (20x increase) Max throughput per share Up to 60 MiB/s Up to storage account limit (150x increase) For more information on Azure storage redundancy and choosing what’s right for you, see Azure Storage redundancy. Pricing and availability Pricing is based on the standard file share tier and redundancy option configured for the storage account. To learn more, see Azure Files Pricing. Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares is now generally available in most regions and we will be expanding to all regions in the coming months. To view the latest information, see regional availability. Getting started Getting started is simple. In regions that are now generally available:&n
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Storage, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

The availability of Azure compute reservations will continue until further notice

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 Z

Initially planned to end on January 1, 2024, the availability of Azure compute reservation exchanges for Azure Virtual Machine, Azure Dedicated Host and Azure App Service has been extended until further notice.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, App Service, Dedicated Host, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure billing meters: What you need to know about the upcoming changes

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 22:30:00 Z

Overview This article is to inform you of some important changes that we are making as part of our ongoing efforts to improve your Azure experience and increase pricing transparency. We are making changes to the billing meters that could affect some Azure services and resources that you may use, and we want to make sure you understand what the changes are, why we are doing them, and how they will impact your billing. These updates will not impact your prices, but you may notice some changes in how your Azure consumption is shown on your invoice, price sheet, API, and other Cost Management tools. What is happening?Over the next several months, we will be updating a number of Azure billing meters to reflect the true meter ID metadata. A billing meter is used to determine the cost of using a specific service or resource in Azure. It helps calculate the amount you will be charged based on the quantity of the resource consumed. The billing meter varies depending on the type of service or resource. These updates will result in having only individual, unique meters. This means that each Azure service, resource, and region will have its own billing meter ID that precisely reflects its consumption and price. This will ensure that you see the correct meter ID on your invoice. This process will be implemented in batches over the next several months. Every time a batch is completed, we will update this blog. You may receive direct notifications if the upcoming batch of new meters impacts you, given your consumption. At every stage, we will continue to add the list of updated meters to this MS Learn page, and it will serve as the main reference for this project. Figure 1. Updated meter information Service Name Product Name Region Feature Meter Type Meter ID (new) Meter ID (previous) Virtual Machines Virtual Machines DSv3 Series Windows CH West Low Priority 1 Compute Hour 59f7c6d9-3658-5693-8925-4aae24068de8 0ce7683b-0630-4103-a9a7
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Cost Management, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Virtual Wan Traffic Flow Patterns

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 22:10:45 Z

Virtual Wan Traffic Flow Scenarios This guide offers an exploration of the essential elements related to vWAN traffic flows, including their significance in shaping flow topology patterns. At the heart of the vWAN branch architecture lie pivotal components such as VPN, SD-WAN, and ExpressRoute. Within the vHub ecosystem, the routing instances hold the crucial role in managing traffic flows, employing BGP for communication. These routing instances, concealed from the end user within the vHub, serve as the linchpin of the vWAN system. The routing instances bear the responsibility of intercepting and directing traffic flows, ensuring the smooth transmission of data packets. If packet flow inspection is also required, these can be aided by an Azure Firewall (AzFW) or Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) inside the vHub. The moment an NVA or AzFW is incorporated into the vHub, they gain control over the data plane packet interception. To enable this inspection, Routing Intent must be enabled on multi-vhub scenarios, or Private/Internet Traffic must be enabled via Firewall policy if an Azure Firewall is deployed within the vHub(s). The subsequent diagrams offer a pictorial depiction of the various flow patterns observed for single and multiple hubs within the vWAN infrastructure. The intent of this article is to provide a more detailed depiction of flow patterns than currently available in the Azure public documents, vWAN Flow Patterns. Understanding the flows and components involved in vWAN pricing is also essential, and this can help explain how vWAN pricing works. For details on vWAN pricing, please refer to the vWAN Pricing Page Single vWAN Hub Traffic Flows Traffic Flow Paths Flow A Spoke VM-->Routing Instances-->Spoke VM Flow B Spoke VM-->vHub VPN-->Branch VPN Concentrator Flow C Spoke VM-->MSEE IP-->Branch Customer Edge (CE) (Egress flows for ExR bypass the ExR GW!) Flow D Branch Customer Edge (CE)-->MSEE
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, ExpressRoute, Azure Firewall, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing General Availability of Azure API Management Basic v2 and Standard v2 Tiers

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 Z

We're thrilled to announce the General Availability of Azure API Management's newest pricing tiers – Basic v2 and Standard v2. The Azure API Management v2 pricing tiers represent a significant leap forward, offering a comprehensive range of capabilities tailored to projects of all sizes, from small-scale endeavors to large-scale enterprise applications. Importantly, these new v2 pricing tiers are available alongside our existing Azure API Management classic pricing tiers, ensuring continuity for users. It's worth noting that the Azure API Management classic pricing tiers remain actively supported and invested in.
Update Type: GA, Services: API Management, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General availability: Availability zone volume placement for Azure NetApp Files

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 Z

Deploy new Azure NetApp Files volumes in Azure availability zones (AZs) of your choice to support workloads across multiple availability zones
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: On-demand capacity reservations for Specialty SKUs

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 Z

You can now reserve capacity with SLA for following Specialty VM sizes, Mv3 series, NC-series (v3 and newer), NV-series (v2 and newer), and Lsv2 series
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: Use Azure Blob Storage on Windows as a file share using Network File System(NFS) 3.0

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 16:56:46 Z

Azure Blob Storage team is announcing the Public Preview of the capability to use Blob storage on Windows using Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol, while capability to access Blob Storage using NFS on Linux is generally available (GA). Standard NFS version 3.0 protocol is natively supported as a Storage Endpoint, and typically used in large scale read-heavy workloads. Mounting Blob Storage as a file share using NFS has following advantages: Works with existing applications - Customer can take advantage of widely used NFS protocol with POSIX compliance on top of Blob Storage on cloud without refactoring their existing applications. They can easily replace the path of on-premises file share with path of Blob Storage mounted as a file share using NFS. Open & Interoperable - Customer can bring data via. rest or sftp protocol and operate on the same data using NFS and vice versa. Scalable & Performant – Offers petabyte scale and high throughput as it is built on top of Azure Blob Storage. Durable & Available – Multiple redundancy options to protect customers from disaster and data loss. Manageable and Secure - Data management and security features such as lifecycle management, immutable storage, customer-managed key for encryption. Cost efficient - Flexible pay-as-you-go blob pricing model allows for cost-optimizations and low total cost of ownership (TCO). Data is billed at the same rate as Azure Blob Storage capacity charges. Some of the common use cases of using Blob Storage mounted as a file share via. NFS on Windows are as follows: Analytics – Windows analytics applications can operate on the large amount of data stored on Blob Storage as a file share on Windows reducing the cost of data storage with advantages of high throughput and TPS. Multi-client log aggregation – Applications running on multiple Windows/Linux nodes can mount the same Blob Storage account as a file share and aggregate the logs in a single storage account for anal
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure Storage, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General Availability: Azure NetApp Files support for 1 TiB capacity pools

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files now supports smaller 1 TiB capacity pool sizes, lowered from 2 TiB, when used with volumes using standard network features.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: Azure Modeling and Simulation Workbench

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure Modeling and Simulation Workbench is a new service that provides a fully managed work environment for engineering development, accelerating project startup, and enabling secure collaboration between development teams.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Azure NetApp Files, M&S Workbench, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Now available: Free data transfer out to internet when leaving Azure

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 Z

Learn how to qualify for free egress when moving your data out of Azure.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

How to optimize your Azure compute spend with savings plan and reserved instances

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 17:27:33 Z

Introduction If you are using Azure compute services, such as virtual machines, dedicated hosts, or container instances, you may be wondering how to optimize your spending. Azure offers two pricing models that can help you get the most out of your compute investment: Azure savings plan for compute and reserved instances. But what are the differences between these two pricing models and how do you decide which one to use for your workloads? In this blog post, we will explain the key features and benefits of Azure savings plan and reserved instances, and how to use them together to achieve the best results. What is the difference between Azure savings plan and reserved instances? Azure savings plan and reserved instances are both ways to optimize your Azure compute usage by committing to a certain amount of spend or usage for a specific period of time. However, they have different characteristics and advantages that suit different scenarios and needs. Azure savings plan allows you to save up to 65% on select compute services by committing to a fixed hourly amount for one or three years (ex: $5/hr). You can use any eligible compute service, such as virtual machines, dedicated hosts, or Azure Premium Functions, in any region and operating system, and get the savings automatically applied to your usage. You can also change your compute configuration, such as instance size, series, or region, at any time without affecting your savings. Azure savings plan is ideal for customers who have dynamic or unpredictable workloads that need flexibility and simplicity. Reserved instances are a way to save up to 72% on your compute usage by pre-purchasing a specific instance size, series, and region for one or three years (ex: Ev5 VM in US West). Reserved instances are best for customers who have stable and predictable workloads that do not change frequently. You can also use instance size flexibility to apply your reservation to other instance sizes within the same instance famil
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: New Generation AMD VMs - Dasv6/Easv6/Fasv6

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 Z

Azure introduces the latest AMD-based VMs in public preview for the D, E, and F series VMs, built on the 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ (Genoa) CPU.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Dedicated clusters in Azure Monitor logs now support any commitment tier

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 00:00:00 Z

We are pleased to announce that it is now possible to create dedicated clusters in public and sovereign clouds at any commitment tiers, starting at a minimum of 100GB per day. This capability is…
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure Monitor, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Advisor integration with Azure Monitor Log Analytics Workspace

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 Z

Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage telemetry and then recommends solutions that can help you improve the cost effectiveness, performance, Reliability, and security of your Azure resources.  We in Azure Monitor believe that observability should be cost effective, and we want to help our customers control their cost, operational excellence, performance, reliability, and security of their  Azure  resources. This, in turn, helps grow their overall satisfaction with, and usage of Azure. We have introduced several cost optimization related recommendations and added Azure Advisor to the Log Analytics Workspace admin experience. more recommendations are on the way.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure Advisor, Azure Monitor, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Spring Apps Enterprise is now eligible for Azure savings plan for compute

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 Z

Enjoy up to 47% savings when you commit to Azure savings plan for Azure Spring Apps Enterprise.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Azure Spring Apps, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: Intel TDX based confidential VMs now available in the Azure portal, Azure CLI and ARM templates

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 Z

The DCesv5 and ECesv5-series confidential virtual machines (VMs) are now available in the Azure portal and via the CLI and ARM templates. These VMs enable organizations to bring confidential workloads to the cloud without code changes to applications.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: Azure NetApp Files support for 1 TiB capacity pools

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files 1 TiB capacity pool sizes, when used with volumes using standard network features is now in preview.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General Availability: Azure NetApp Files support for 2 TiB capacity pools

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files now supports smaller 2 TiB capacity pool sizes, lowered from 4 TiB, when used with volumes using standard network features.
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General availability: Reservations for Microsoft Fabric

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

You can now save up to 40.5% on Microsoft Fabric capacity when you commit to one-year reservations.
Update Type: GA, Services: Microsoft Fabric, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing the support of Arm-based VM solutions on Azure Marketplace

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:00:00 Z

Azure now has broader support for Arm customers and partners. Partners, with solutions built for Arm-based architecture, can now add their Arm products to the Azure Marketplace, and customers can use these solutions to reduce their engineering efforts and benefit from the flexibility of the multi-architecture support. This facilitates the growth of the Arm ecosystem within Azure and unlocks new workflows and possibilities for developers to build on Arm-based platforms. Azure publishers can add support for Arm-based solutions in Azure global regions, enabling customers to tailor their infrastructure based on their needs. With these new solutions, customers can now deploy Arm-based solutions from the Azure Marketplace and benefit from the growing and vibrant ecosystem developing around Arm-based Azure infrastructure. Over the last few years, software developers have embraced the opportunity to develop their applications and solutions on Arm64 architecture. Customers can now deploy Arm64 optimized software solutions directly from the Azure Marketplace to increase agility and accelerate innovation. Customers and application developers can take advantage of Azure’s scalable and secure platform to run, build, and test cloud-based workloads with less overhead and maintenance. Azure Arm-based Virtual Machines (VMs) deliver improved price-performance and power efficiency. These VMs run Linux and Windows-based workloads. To support client application developers and software-providers, building for Windows on Arm64 devices, we’ve made Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise available on Arm-based Azure VMs. You can access the complete list of solutions in All products – Microsoft Azure Marketplace. You can learn more about Azure Arm-based VMs by visiting Dpsv5 and Dpdsv5-series, Dplsv5 and Dpldsv5-series, Epsv5 and Epdsv5-series, Bpsv2-series and checking prices at Azure Virtual Machines pricing. For publishers, Partner Center provides incre
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public Preview: Azure IoT Operations

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure IoT Operations is now in Public Preview. Azure IoT Operations addresses an enterprise’s fundamental needs, but also wrangles edge data to generate local insights and brings interoperability and scalability to IoT solutions.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Kubernetes Service, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Announcing the public preview of Azure confidential VMs with Intel TDX

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Microsoft is excited to announce the public preview of DCesv5 and ECesv5-series confidential VMs. These VMs are powered by 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (TDX). They enable organizations to bring confidential workloads to the cloud without code changes to applications and will be available starting December 1st.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

GA: Azure Boost

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure Boost is one of Microsoft Azure’s latest and most significant infrastructure innovations, enabling greater network and storage performance at scale, improves security, and reduced servicing impact.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: New Generation AMD VMs - Dasv6/Easv6/Fasv6

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Export cost details using the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS)

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 Z

Sign up for an early preview of Cost Management exports that provide cost data aligned to the open-source FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS).
Update Type: Preview, Services: Cost Management, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: Azure NetApp Files standard storage with cool access

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure NetApp Files standard storage with cool access is now in public preview. With the new cool access feature, you can enable standard volumes with the ability to transparently store data more cost-effectively on Azure storage accounts based on its access pattern.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

The availability of Azure compute reservations exchanges extended until at least July 1st, 2024

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 Z

The availability of Azure compute reservations exchanges extended until at least July 1st, 2024
Update Type: Announcement, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Container Apps is now eligible for Azure savings plan for compute

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 Z

You can now take advantage of Azure savings plan pricing for Azure Container Apps.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Container Apps, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure Internet Analyzer will be retired on 15 March 2024 – delete profiles

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure Internet Analyzer will be retired on 15 March 2024  
Update Type: Deprecation, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Azure AI Translator S2-S4 billing instances will be retired on 1 October 2026 – transition to Commitment Tiers for discounted pricing.

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 Z

Retirement notice: Translator S2-S4 Volume Discount Instances will be retired on 1 October 2026
Update Type: Deprecation, Services: , Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General Availability: Malware Scanning in Defender for Storage

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 Z

Malware Scanning in Defender for Storage enables organizations to detect and prevent malware distribution events with content scanning upon upload and near real-time malware detection powered by Microsoft Defender Antivirus technologies.
Update Type: GA, Services: Defender for Cloud, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

General availability: Azure Backup support for Azure Files in China North2, China East 2, China North 3, and China East 3

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 Z

Azure Backup now supports Azure Files in China North2, China East 2, China North 3, and China East 3
Update Type: GA, Services: Azure Backup, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

GA: Latest generation burstable VMs - Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 Z

The new second generation burstable VMs provide the lowest cost of entry to the Azure VM portfolio with greater performance.
Update Type: Announcement, Services: Virtual Machines, Categories: Pricing & Offerings

Public preview: Standard network features support in US Government region

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 Z

Standard network features for azure NetApp files are now available in the US Government (VA) region.
Update Type: Preview, Services: Azure NetApp Files, Categories: Pricing & Offerings