This chapter explains how Azure billing works, service by service: the meter Microsoft counts, the price that meter carries in Germany West Central, and the line it becomes in the cost export and the FOCUS export. Reading an Azure bill takes three things per service: the pricing dimensions, the meters under which the usage appears, and the levers that change the amount. Every page of this chapter supplies exactly those three for one service or one group of services, with list prices in EUR from the Azure Retail Prices API, read on the date each page names.

What this chapter covers

The chapters before this one explained how a cloud bill comes about, how billing data is structured, and what cloud services cost at AWS, Azure and Google Cloud side by side. This chapter stays with one provider and goes deep. Azure bills every service through meters: a VM is compute hours per size plus a licence share, disks, a public IP and bandwidth, each its own meter; a storage account is capacity per tier plus operations per 10,000 plus retrieval; a database is vCore hours or DTUs plus storage, backup and high availability. One architecture therefore produces dozens of meters with their own MeterCategory, MeterSubCategory and MeterName, and many of them sit under a service name you would not expect: the commitment tier of a Log Analytics workspace under Azure Monitor, the licence share of a Windows VM under Virtual Machines, the bandwidth of every service under Bandwidth. The pages name those meters so a line in the export can be read back to the resource and the decision that caused it.

Seven sections structure the chapter:

Every service page follows the same structure: the pricing dimensions as a table, the meters and columns under which the usage appears in the export and in FOCUS, the levers by configuration, purchase option and architecture, the ways it goes wrong with the symptom in billing data, one example with list prices in EUR for Germany West Central, and the sources with their read date. The billing-mechanics pages replace the export section with invoices, exports and APIs, because they describe no metered service but what shapes the invoice.

What this chapter is not: a comparison across providers and not a tool manual. The comparison, which meters AWS, Azure and Google Cloud count for the same kind of service, is the chapter What cloud services cost; the portal, its views and exports are the chapter Tooling, with Azure Cost Management as the page for Microsoft's own tool. A price on these pages is a list price read on the stated date; an EA, MCA or CSP agreement changes it, as the billing-mechanics section explains, and the export's EffectivePrice is what was actually paid.

Key terms

  • meter: the unit Azure counts and prices for one resource, named by category, subcategory and meter name; every page lists the meters of its service.
  • SKU: the size or tier of a resource that selects the meter and its rate, from a VM size to a disk tier to a Fabric capacity.
  • line item: one row of the cost export, one meter of one resource on one day, with quantity, unit price and effective price.
  • usage export: the scheduled export of cost details Microsoft writes to a storage account, the source every page reads its columns from.
  • reserved instance: Azure's reservation of a resource for one or three years at a lower rate, applied to matching usage every hour.
  • savings plan: the hourly commitment to compute spend that Azure applies across services and regions.
  • effective cost: the cost after discounts and with purchases amortised, the figure a chargeback uses rather than the invoice line.
  • billing account: the agreement that invoices sit under, EA, MCA or CSP, which decides the scopes a budget, an export and a reservation can have.

Neighbouring chapters

Before this chapter stand AWS billing and pricing, the same structure for Amazon's services, and before that What cloud services cost, whose cross-provider pages this chapter's pages are children of: virtual machines and compute, managed databases, block, object and file storage, data transfer and egress and observability, logging and monitoring. After it comes Google Cloud billing and pricing, the third provider in the same shape.

Two chapters supply what these pages assume. Billing data explains the export every page names its columns from: Azure cost exports and FOCUS columns. Pricing models explains the purchase options the levers point to: Azure reservations, Azure Savings Plans and reserved capacity for managed services; what an enterprise agreement does to the price is in enterprise agreements and private pricing. The full list of chapters is in the handbook.