Microsoft has reduced the price of some virtual machine (VM) instances and storage offerings on its Azure public cloud platform. Here’s how much you will save.
We confirmed with Microsoft Australia that the price reductions apply to the local Azure regions.
Microsoft offers a number of different types of VM instances globally. The ones that will be discounted are the Compute Optimised F Series (up to 24% off) and the general purpose A1 Basic VM instances (up to 61% off).
Azure F Series virtual machines are optimised for compute intensive workloads. They are suitable for scenarios like batch processing, web servers, analytics and gaming.
Here’s how much the F Series instances cost for Azure in Australia using CentOS or Ubuntu Linux (regions labelled):
| Instances | Cores | RAM | Disk Sizes | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 | 1 | 2GiB | 16GB | $0.0828/hr (East) $0.0828/hr (Southeast) |
| F2 | 2 | 4GiB | 32GB | $0.1656/hr (East) $0.1656/hr (Southeast) |
| F4 | 4 | 8GiB | 64GB | $0.3324/hr (East) $0.3324/hr (Southeast) |
| F8 | 8 | 16GiB | 128GB | $0.6649/hr (East) $0.6649/hr (Southeast) |
| F16 | 16 | 32GiB | 256GB | $1.3272/hr (East) $1.3272/hr (Southeast) |
A Basic instances are suitable for development workloads, test servers, build servers, code repositories, low-traffic websites and web applications, micro services, early product experiments and small databases. It’s the more economical option.
Here’s how much A Basic instances cost for Azure in Australia using CentOS or Ubuntu Linux (regions labelled):
| Instances | Cores | RAM | Disk Sizes | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A0 | 1 | 0.75GiB | 20GB | $0.0306/hr (East) $0.306/hr (Southeast) |
| A1 | 1 | 1.75GiB | 40GB | $0.0408/hr (East) $0.0408/hr (Southeast) |
| A2 | 2 | 3.5GiB | 60GB | $0.1248/hr (East) $0.1325/hr (Southeast) |
| A3 | 4 | 7GiB | 120GB | $0.2955/hr (East) $0.2955/hr (Southeast) |
| A4 | 8 | 14GiB | 240GB | $0.591/hr (East) $0.591/hr (Southeast) |
You can compare some of the prices here with our condensed pricing list from October. It seems that Microsoft has made the pricing for the F Series and A Basic more uniform between the East and Southeast regions.
Azure Blog Storage, which is used for streaming and storing documents, videos, pictures, backups and other unstructured text or binary data. Microsoft is offering a price reduction of up to 26% for Hot Block Blob storage and 38% for Cool Block Blog storage.
You can visit the Azure Pricing page for all the details.
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