Azure App Service team is excited to announce that the entry-level Premium plan known as P0v3 is now available at a significantly lower price, making it even more convenient and affordable to get started in your AI apps journey using your favorite platform-as-a-service. There is no change in price of other Azure App Service Premium plans. 

How much can you save with Premium v3?

Premium v3 is the latest generation of Azure App Service that offers high performance, high scalability, and high reliability as a multi-tenant managed service. Unlike previous generation plans such as Premium v2 or Standard, Premium v3 plans include commitment-based savings over one and three years that significantly lower the monthly bills, while delivering more powerful compute resources. Azure savings plans and reserved instance (RI) pricing—only available on the Premium v3 and Isolated v2 tiers—provide up to 55 percent more savings compared to the pay-as-you-go plan. In just over a year since its release, the P0v3 plan with a single core, 4GB RAM, and 250GB included storage has quickly become one of the fastest growing consumption plans in Azure App Service. With this price drop, you have another compelling reason to accelerate your ambitions to build and modernize AI apps on Azure. 

Figure 1 Snapshot of Premium v3 monthly pricing for US East region on Linux after the price drop

Why are we making this change now?

We hear from IT leaders and decision makers that the evolution of GenAI has accelerated App Modernization momentum across companies of all sizes and cloud maturity levels. A recently commissioned study by IDC, “Exploring the Benefits of Cloud Migration and Modernization for the Development of Intelligent Applications,” based on interviews with 900 IT leaders worldwide, revealed that what set them up for success in the AI era was the fact that they had already begun modernizing their app infrastructure on Azure. Generative AI models, like those powering ChatGPT or image-generating tools, are data-hungry beasts. They require massive computing resources, flexible scaling, and access to vast datasets to deliver their transformative capabilities. Cloud platforms provide the robust infrastructure and storage solutions necessary to support AI workloads, all fully managed by the provider. They offer virtually unlimited scalability, ensuring applications can handle fluctuating demand and deliver consistent performance. 

Here are three reasons why developers find it easy to build AI apps on Azure App Service:

Integration with AI Services: Azure App Service seamlessly integrates with various Azure AI services, such as Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning. This allows developers to take advantage of the Azure ecosystem and easily add capabilities like natural language processing, image recognition, and machine learning models to their applications.
Scalability and Performance: Azure App Service provides robust scalability and performance features, ensuring that AI applications can handle varying loads and deliver consistent performance. This is crucial for AI apps that may require significant computational resources.
Developer Productivity: Azure App Service supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, and it offers tools and features that enhance developer productivity. This includes continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) capabilities, which streamline the development and deployment process.

By lowering the barrier to entry on our flagship Premium plan, organizations and developers now have access to a powerful range of hosting plans to build applications with generative AI capabilities on Azure. Whether you are a small team in a large enterprise or a small business, you can take advantage of the Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) savings to let developers focus on innovation and leave the cloud infrastructure management to Azure. As your requirements grow, you can easily scale up with the wide range of plans that go as high as 64 cores and 256GB RAM!

What other cost optimizations are available in Azure?

One of the things to note about cost optimization is that it’s not only about the price. In addition to the price-drop, there are significant financial benefits to be gained when you leverage the right technical resources, have access to best practices from real-world experiences with thousands of customers, and flexibility of the right pricing option for any scenario.

Azure customers benefit from several tools and resources that deliver a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO), including: 

Azure landing zone accelerators
Enterprise web app patterns
Powerful Azure Migrate automation tooling
Offers to offset the initial cost of migration
Cost-effective range of pricing plans

Visit this blog to learn more about these resources to optimize the cost of deploying intelligent apps in Azure.

Get started with Azure App Service today

Premium v3 and Isolated v2 are the best hosting plans for Azure App Service, offering you more power, less cost, and more features for your web apps. To get started with Premium v3 and Isolated v2, you can create a new App Service plan or change your existing one in the Azure portal without any downtime or code changes. You can also try Azure App Service for free.

You can check out the full pricing details on the Azure App Service pricing page. Note that there is no change to the pricing of other plans. Use the Azure price calculator to estimate your hourly or monthly costs for using Azure.

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