The irony is that most of the cost-saving features in Azure don’t apply the way people think, so it’s often more expensive to run Microsoft software in Azure than it is on-premise!

For example, SQL Server is licensed per physical core, but in Azure it is per vCPU which is a hyperthread = half a CPU! This means that database licensing is - surprise - twice the price in the cloud.

Similarly, Azure SQL is always priced as if it was Enterprise Edition.

There are only a handful of ways to actually “save money” in Azure, and they’re basically the same as on-premises: buy licenses for entire physical hosts and use license mobility.

Even our biggest government customers can’t use this because it would require them to buy 2x of each host “type” they want to use per Subscription, which is too much capacity that can’t be fully utilised without careful management. The manual packing of workloads into a small number of hosts totally eliminates the main benefit of the cloud!

I swear that the finance departments of big enterprises are simply allergic to offering anything truly flexible to customers. Everything has to be sold in big chunks reserved for three years.

“Come to the cloud! It’s more flexible! It’s cheaper! Now sign this in triplicate so you can’t use the flexibility or escape our inflated prices for a third of a decade!”