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Azure adds programmatic pricing API to help you sniff out global deals

Seventeen currencies - not just the Greenback - are now just an API call away

Microsoft has tweaked its Retail Rates API to offer retail pricing information for all Azure services in currencies other than the US dollar.

“Azure customers have been looking for a programmatic way to retrieve retail prices for all Azure services in different currencies,” because until now learning Azure prices has required either the Azure Pricing Calculator or use the Azure portal.

Those tools are rather hands-on. Yet Azure has 54 regions and over 6,000 services.

The new API, currently in public preview, makes Azure prices available at https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices.

There’s syntax to learn if you want to make this work, in the form of the following filters:

  • armRegionName
  • Location
  • meterId
  • meterName
  • productid
  • skuId
  • productName
  • skuName
  • serviceName
  • serviceId
  • serviceFamily
  • priceType
  • armSkuName

As an example of that lot at work, here’s how to find prices for compute resources in Euros:

https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices?currencyCode='EUR'&$filter=serviceFamily eq 'Compute' .

Output is in JSON:

{
            “;currencyCode”;: “;USD”;,
            “;tierMinimumUnits”;: 0.0,
            “;retailPrice”;: 0.176346,
            “;unitPrice”;: 0.176346,
            “;armRegionName”;: “;westeurope”;,
            “;location”;: “;EU West”;,
            “;effectiveStartDate”;: “;2020-08-01T00:00:00Z”;,
            “;meterId”;: “;000a794b-bdb0-58be-a0cd-0c3a0f222923”;,
            “;meterName”;: “;F16s Spot”;,
            “;productId”;: “;DZH318Z0BQPS”;,
            “;skuId”;: “;DZH318Z0BQPS/00TG”;,
            “;productName”;: “;Virtual Machines FS Series Windows”;,
            “;skuName”;: “;F16s Spot”;,
            “;serviceName”;: “;Virtual Machines”;,
            “;serviceId”;: “;DZH313Z7MMC8”;,
            “;serviceFamily”;: “;Compute”;,
            “;unitOfMeasure”;: “;1 Hour”;,
            “;type”;: “;DevTestConsumption”;,
            “;isPrimaryMeterRegion”;: true,
            “;armSkuName”;: “;Standard_F16s”;
        }

Why JSON? Because Microsoft thinks you’ll “create your own tools for internal analysis and price comparison across SKUs and regions.”

Which may be a bit of a stretch for many, especially as big Azure users tend to negotiate prices rather than rely on retail rates.

The supported currencies are:

  • US dollar
  • Australian dollar
  • Brazilian real
  • Canadian dollar
  • Swiss franc
  • Chinese yuan
  • Danish krone
  • Euros
  • British pound
  • Indian rupee
  • Japanese yen
  • Korean won
  • Norwegian krone
  • New Zealand dollar
  • Russian ruble
  • Swedish krona
  • Taiwan dollar

Microsoft's not said when the service will exit preview and become official. ®

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