AKS offers a number of alternatives to the on-demand pricing plan: Reserved instances This option is a good pick for steady-state use. A year-long or three-year-long commitment provides price consistency, monthly payment alternatives, and priority computing capacity. Azure claims that 1-year reserved Virtual Machines Linux DSv2 saves 48% over pay-as-you-go. However, one or three years of commitment in the cloud is a long time. Your business or technology needs might change, and you’ll end up with massively underutilized capacity if you pay upfront. Also, forecasting your demand over the full term is difficult.  Spot VMs Spot Virtual Machine instances offer huge savings, up to 90% less than on-demand charges. Batch processing and machine learning training are excellent use cases for them.  While spot VMs can save money quickly, not all workloads are suitable since Azure may reclaim the cloud resources at any moment, with only a 30-second warning. To make the most of spot VMs, you need to have a strategy for interruptions in place – and, ideally, a way of automating them just like CAST AI does.  Hybrid Benefit This is a licensing deal that enables you to migrate to Azure and save money. To be eligible for this benefit, you need to be paying for either Windows Server or SQL Server with Software Assurance, or operating instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on a current Linux subscription. Azure Hybrid Benefit helps optimize business applications while achieving cost savings, modernizing and maintaining a flexible hybrid infrastructure.