In today's article, we will cover the step-by-step procedure for performing Instance Reservation Exchange in Azure.
During the management of your cloud environment, you may encounter situations where there is a need to delete resources, such as virtual machines, for example, in order to restructure your cloud architecture.
In other cases, we may face scenarios where the acquisition of reservations was adopted as a short-term solution to reduce costs and meet the budget.
There are also scenarios where the acquisition of Instance Reservations was not properly designed and is incompatible with actual needs, either due to a subsequent rightsizing that should have preceded the contract or due to a lack of adequate planning.
Think it’s over? How about considering a chaotic scenario where so many reservations were acquired and returned that the limit of $50,000 was reached, preventing any further returns? A scenario where Instance Reservations were acquired for volatile and constantly changing environments, leading to constant contracting and returning?
In all the cases mentioned above, it is still possible to perform the Instance Reservation Exchange, even if returns can no longer be made.
Policy for Performing the Exchange
Currently, there is no limit or charge for exchanging instance reservations. There are some new rules, which you can check in this post.
When exchanging a reservation, regardless of the time remaining until the expiration of the reservations being returned, the new reservation acquired will have its full term of 1 or 3 years. In other words, if you return a 3-year reservation with only 6 months left until the contract expires, the new reservation acquired in the exchange will not last for 6 months, but rather for 12 or 36 months.
It is not possible to exchange the following reservations:
- Reserved capacity of Azure Databricks
- Provisioned transfer fee of Azure OpenAI
- Pre-purchase plan of Synapse Analytics
- Red Hat plans
- SUSE Linux plans
It is also not possible to exchange one type of reservation for another type.
When an exchange is made, Microsoft cancels the existing reservation, and then the new purchase is processed. Thus, an exchange is processed as a refund followed by a new purchase.
Prerequisites
- Contributor or Owner access
- Billing Account Administrator access
- Reservation Administrator
Instructions
To perform an Exchange, follow these steps:
Through the Azure Portal, select “Cost Management + Billing”;
In the left sidebar, under the “Products + services” tab, select “Reservations + Hybrid Benefit”;
Select the Instance Reservations to be returned, and in the top menu click on “Exchange”;
- In the “Reservations to return” tab, you can define the number of reservations you wish to return, as well as add new reservations that can be returned by clicking on “Add more products to return”;
Note that in the corner of the screen you will receive three different pieces of information:
- Today’s refund: total amount to be refunded that day, related to the reservations being returned.
- Canceled future charges: total amount of the remaining period for each of the reservations. The remaining value of the total contract of 1 or 3 years.
- Total return value: The sum of the two previous values, which will be taken into account in the reservation exchange.
- In the “Purchase” tab, select the type of reservation and the desired SKU for contracting.
Note that in the corner of the screen you will receive two pieces of information:
- Today’s charge: the amount that will be charged that day for the contracting of the reservations.
- Total cost: the total value of the reservations for the full contract period.
It is important to highlight that the “Total Cost” of the purchase needs to be greater than or equal to the “Total return value.” This way, you can return as many reservations as necessary to cover the cost of contracting a new reservation as much as possible.
Finally, click on “Review: Purchase”
- In the “Review” tab, check the information and click on “Exchange.”
Check the original article in Portuguese here
