4 Takeaways from Azure Savings Plan for Compute

Purchasing consumption in advance can be extremely effective not only considering the large discounts get applied. With the business market trends that are fluctuating and swinging at such an unpredicted fashion and the market forces are unknown to which be accounted in, having a 3 year predictability is a bonus. Reserved instances have been very helpful with Azure but it came with certain limitations. Here are my top 4 takeaways from Azure Savings Plan for Compute. 

1. More flexibility over Reserved Instances

Reserved instances came with a few restrictions that were not much capable of moving things around. Even some of the available flexibility will be reduced by next year. Savings Plan for Compute can be activated at many different scopes and can be changed even after purchase. Also it allows using a vast range of services ranging from Azure Functions (Premium, Dedicated) to VMs to VMSS. 

Nevertheless, Reserve Instances are unannounced to be decommissioned anytime soon.

Service Connectors in Azure App Services

Are we ready to say bye to the connection strings when connecting to a database? Yes we were when the managed identities came in. It reduced the hassle of storing connection strings with passwords and provided the opportunity for the infra team to set them up. All the developers have to setup is the url and the authentication mechanism. 

Service connectors just allow regulate these connections in a much better way. It is a feature add-on that available for App Services, Container Apps and Spring Apps. There are multiple targeted services that include DB services and necessary Azure services. 

Creating a connection in Portal is simple as a few clicks. Although the same can be done with Azure CLI.