As part of our promise to deliver the best customer value on Azure, we have had a longstanding commitment to make our prices comparable on commodity services like compute, storage, and bandwidth relative to Amazon Web Services. In keeping to this commitment, we are announcing price reductions up to 17% on the latest version of the popular Azure D-series virtual machines, Dv2 Virtual Machines. Dv2 Virtual Machines sport 35% faster CPUs than D “v1” virtual machines and are based on the newest generation Intel Xeon (Haswell) processors.
The below table shows the price reductions using our US East 2 region as an example. The Dv2 price reductions will take effect early February and we will share full details on this page.
| Virtual Machine Type | Price Reduction (Windows Server Instances) | Price Reduction (Linux Instances) |
|---|---|---|
| D1-D5 v2 | 10% | 14% |
| D11-14 v2 | 13% | 17% |
It is worthwhile to note that the Azure Dv2 instances – unlike AWS EC2 instances – have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge. This means you get even more value from Azure. In addition to delivering great prices, we provide further discounting and more flexible purchasing programs to support your journey to the cloud.
- For customers with Enterprise Agreements, you not only get price reductions like these, but also your price points are even lower – in many cases well below available AWS pricing – re-enforcing our commitment to be the number one enterprise cloud.
- Unlike AWS, Azure virtual machine usage is billed on per-minute rate so you only pay for the compute that you use. With AWS you pay for an hour even if you only use a few minutes.
- For developers, Microsoft provides up to $150 free Azure credits per month along with discounts for Dev/Test workloads through the Microsoft Developer Network program. Any developer will be able to get $25 free Azure credits per month for one year with the Dev Essentials program coming soon.
- With the Azure Compute Pre-Purchase plan, you can receive up to 63% cost savings when you pre-purchase your virtual machines for one year.
- If you’re moving a significant number of workloads to the cloud and are looking for great pricing with lots of flexibility, check out the Azure Compute option. With this program, you can run any compute instance in Azure and realize discounts up to 60% in exchange for add-ons to your Windows Server annuity licenses.
More information on these and other pricing programs are available here.
Prices aside, customers are using Azure for the value it brings. Customer are using Azure for its hybrid capabilities that enable existing on-premises environments to seamlessly bridge with the public cloud – a reality for the vast majority of organizations. Azure customers are also using the rich set of services spanning IaaS and PaaS. Today, more than half of Azure IaaS customers are already benefiting by adopting higher level PaaS services – where Azure has always offered the industry leading capabilities. Companies large and small such as Towers Watson, BMW and Jet.com are taking advantage of these application platform level Azure services to improve their business agility and gain competitive advantage. While we’ll continue to offer great low prices, we’re even more proud of offering you a comprehensive cloud platform that helps you innovate faster, no matter where you are in your cloud journey.
