Microsoft announce the Azure savings plan for compute. This enables customers to take advantage of better pricing across a range of Azure compute services by committing to spend a fixed hourly amount for one or three years. Once the plan is purchased the lower prices are automatically applied to eligible services across all Azure regions. However, Reserved Instances still offer the best prices for customers who are committed to a specific VM family in a specific region.

As a comparison, a D8s v4 VM running in the East US data centre has a PAYG price of $0.7520 per hour, a 1-year RI price of $0.5938 per hour (21% savings), and a 1-year savings plan price of $0.6314 (16% savings).

This is a useful page to get started on the Azure savings plan for compute: https://bit.ly/3gipyJp, and this is where you’ll find the detail on how to buy a plan and how discounts are applied etc: https://bit.ly/3VDy1XO.