Hello
I've been reading a lot about Azure in the last months, but some questions remained unanswered:
- I have read about the Compute Pre-Purchase plan which lowers the cost of virtual machine if the customer pays one year in advance. This is only available with an Enterprise Agreement. But what are the requirements to get such an agreement? How much volume would I need?
- There are some rumours about a new feature which allow Microsoft to patch their hosts without a reboot so that a SLA for single instance virtual machines can be provided. (Link: http://up2v.nl/2015/10/08/big-news-for-azure-9999-sla-for-single-instance-vms-before-year-end/) Do you know more about that? I couldn't find more information on the topic.
We have customers with legacy applications. For them, a constantly running VM on Azure would be more expensive than at a "traditional" provider. And their applications are unable to be run in a cluster, so it's a problem if Azure shuts the VM down while patching the host.
Thank you very much for your help!