If you thought Azure Blob Storage was inexpensive before, how would you like a further 38% discount just to be sure?
In November 2019, Microsoft announced that they would be introducing Reserved Price Discounting for 6 new services, including Blob Storage in GPv2 Accounts:
The pricing is also now available in the Azure Pricing Calculator:
What does this mean?
You can now reserve capacity in advance, the same way you can reserve VM Instances. The new model allows you to reserve capacity for either 1 or 3 years, with a 38% discount on your current costs for 3 years.
This is great for users who have a predictable consumption need.. such as Backup users 🙂
What to look out for:
1, Ensure that your subscription type is eligible for the pricing. These types are currently covered:
“Enterprise Agreement (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0017P or MS-AZR-0148P): For an Enterprise subscription, the charges are deducted from the enrollment’s monetary commitment balance or charged as overage.
Individual subscription with pay-as-you-go rates (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0003P or MS-AZR-0023P): For an individual subscription with pay-as-you-go rates, the charges are billed to the credit card or invoice payment method on the subscription.”
2, The pricing is available in minimum increments of 100TB (i.e. Do not bother if you have a couple of TBs in Azure).
Full details are available here. Please review this in order to understand your particular circumstances:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-reserved-capacity