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Over-Provisioned Resources Use Case

In this use case, we search for resources that are running on old SKU, while never is available.

Identification is directly correlated to Microsoft and their changes to the SKU families, introducing new versions of hardware.

Actions to take against identified resources

The default action to take against these resources is changing sku or resize.

What is Modernizer and why it matters

Imagine buying a PC with a certain generation of CPU and RAM five years ago. There is a good chance that nowadays the CPU and RAM will be superseded by newer generations. If you search for replacement of such CPU, you might encounter any number of issues, starting from supply (same generation might no longer be in production) to incompatibility with the rest of the components inside the PC.

The same struggle is happening inside Azure data centers, but on a much larger scale. Microsoft bought certain hardware years ago and started adding new hardware bit by bit. The problem are old versions of servers running old hardware. Microsoft is still supporting those old versions, but to motivate customers into moving away from them, they introduced discounts and sometimes better performance targets for the newer SKUs, after all new generations of hardware are usually performing better than the old ones.

We call this phenomenon Modernizer. Moving from old version to newer one can have following benefits (sometimes multiple together):

  1. Lower base price, newer SKU with same hardware can be cheaper than the old one, this will be 5 - 15 % reduction in monthly price
  2. Higher savings with reserved instances and saving plans, this is probably the most beneficial factor to upgrade the SKU since the savings can be up to 30% by purchasing reservation on the newer SKU compared to reservations on the lower SKU.
  3. More powerful hardware, old SKU with 7 GB RAM and 2 CPUs might have 8 GB RAM and slightly faster CPU clock speeds on the newer SKU, therefore getting more powerful machine for either same or even less money

Example price calculation for VMs. This price calculation shows Modernizer - D2 V2 and newer SKU D2 V5. Please have a look at price differences, reservation and saving plans differences between those two.

False positives

We estimate that this use case will have 97% confidence. This use case offers maximum confidence as soon as the resource shows as identified.

Unlike other use-cases, confidence doesn't increase with time.