Last week at Ignite, Microsoft announced a bunch of security enhancements for Azure, including a public preview for Azure Firewall Manager. In September, meanwhile, larger standard file shares for Azure Files were made available.
Today, the tech giant has revealed reservations for six more Azure services. As such, the total number of Microsoft cloud services with reserved capacity offerings is now 16. In addition to the 10 already included, coverage for the following services will now be provided:
- Blob Storage (GPv2) and Azure Data Lake Storage (Gen2).
- Azure Database for MySQL.
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
- Azure Database for MariaDB.
- Azure Data Explorer.
- Premium SSD Managed Disks.
Expanding a bit more on how each of these help customers reduce costs, starting with Azure data storage, you can save up to 38 percent on its overall costs by pre-purchasing reserved capacities. These are offered in both one- and three-year options for hot, cool, and archive storage tiers. As far as storage options are concerned, availability for both 100TB and 1PB increments will be provided. You can read more about it here.
As far as Azure Database is concerned, costs for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB can now be reduced by up to 51 percent. Both general-purpose and memory-optimized developments are covered under this, without the requirement of having to make any changes to database resources. Users can switch between the former and the latter to their liking. Furthermore, Data Explorer Markup costs can be saved on by up to 30 percent, though it should be noted that these reservations would only apply on the markup meter, with compute and storage being billed separately. Reservations for virtual machines and associated storage can also be purchased as part of this.
And finally, Premium SSD Managed Disk usage costs can be reduced by 5 percent. Disks, regardless of whether they are attached to a virtual machine or not, will have discounts applied hourly upon them. Moreover, reservation discounts won"t be applied to Premium SSD Unmanaged Disks and Page Blobs usage.
You can purchase reserved capacity for Azure data storage, Database, Data Explorer, and Premium SSD Managed Disks through the associated links. All reservations are flexible and can be exchanged and cancelled when the customer desires, though limits will still apply.