Did you know that you can have significant savings on Dev/Test environments in Azure? I’m working with the Azure Dev/Test team on a project right now, and I didn’t realize exactly how much you can save. They have an offer for Dev/Test where you only pay for the price of compute piece of Azure VMs. This means that even if you are using Microsoft software like Windows or SQL Server you don’t pay for those licenses. The offer allows you to build a new subscription to take advantage of this.
I ran through the calculator to see how much this could save you a month. First, I visited the Azure Calculator and added four Windows Virtual machines to simulate four separate application servers running in East US 2 (FYI – prices are different in each Azure Region). The total cost for these was $548 US dollars, and that is with just a standard disk configuration. The price here includes the compute time for the VM and the cost of the Windows Server OS. Note that I assumed that the VM would be running 24×7.
Next, I added one SQL Server for all of these servers development databases to be together. This price will include the compute power, Windows OS, and SQL Server. The cost here was $1,369 US Dollars per month.
So, we have a total cost on this Pay-as-you-go subscription of $1,918 a month which yearly would be a total of $23,016.
Now, if you look closely at the screenshot above, you will see a slider that will allow you to toggle on the Dev/Test pricing. Here is where the magic happens! The cost just went down to only $420 a month or only $5,040 per year. That is an 80% reduction in price!
So, my advice for you is to take a look at this DevTest offer and see how you can save money. There is also a version of this for Enterprise Agreement customers. Maybe I should start a Patreon page, so you can share your savings?
Happy saving,
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What are the limitations of Enterprise Dev/Test subscriptions? When a company has separate subscriptions for Development, Integration Testing, Quality Assurance Testing and Production; which ones can take advantage of the reduced pricing? Just Development, or can Integration Test and QA qualify as well?
> As the account owner, you must maintain an active Visual Studio subscription to use this offer. Additionally, all others interacting with resources within the Azure subscription that you create based on this offer must be active Visual Studio subscribers.
That’s huge requirement not mentioned in the article.
I have been trying to figure out how to properly use the Azure PAYG Dev/Test subscription, but I can’t figure out how the visual studio subscription requirement is enforced. We have a few people in the office that would qualify, but not everyone, and I’d like to get started with just those I am 100% certain can use those benefits.
However, there doesn’t seem to be a clear way to confirm who can, and who cannot use the VMs at the reduced price, as it doesn’t seem to be enforced in any way once you create a subscription with the offer id MS-AZR-0023P. Are we just expected to create the subscription and restrict access manually to users that qualify for the benefits, hoping that we don’t accidentally let someone without the proper subscription use those resources?
I really want to use those benefits, but the potential for accidentally using benefits we may not be entitled to is scary. Can someone clarify this for me? Thanks!