A couple of days ago, Corey Quinn tweeted :

“Someone asked - I answer. A fully reserved instance of db.r5.24xlarge Enterprise Multi-AZ for SQL Server in Bahrain costs $ 3,118,367. A competition for the most expensive API call in the AWS cloud is announced. ”

A very productive discussion started in the thread, where many nice people tried to find an even better way to spend money on AWS. As an Azure user, I felt sad and lonely, so I decided to correct this injustice. If you are in quarantine and want to spend an insane amount of money somewhere, I can tell you. You only need a Pay-As-You-Go subscription in Azure - and I guarantee that all your hard-earned money will disappear in a moment!

Warm up

The first thing that every sane person who wants to spend the maximum amount of money from any cloud provider will try to do is buy the largest and most expensive virtual machine. Unfortunately, this is not very effective:

One instance of Standard_M416ms_v2 with 416 vCPU and 11,400 GB of RAM, paid for three years in advance, will cost only 802 thousand euros, and this is not even a million! Even worse, Azure offers a 71% discount, and such discounts are completely contrary to our goal. Let's give credit to artificial intelligence: Azure says the recommended number of these instances is zero for me. Pretty accurate guess.

We break through a million (Azure Blob Storage)

What about blob storage? It’s usually very cheap, but what if for some reason you need to store one petabyte in Southern Brazil for the next three years?

Unfortunately, they give a storehouse with a simple geographical reservation (geo-redundant). It remains only to assume how much the storage with the reservation of zones (geo-zone-redundant) would cost if this were available.

We break through a million (Azure Databricks)

Our next candidate is Azure Databricks. I have no idea what it is, and I don’t even care! I only know that this is a rather expensive service, and this is exactly what we need:

For three million euros you can buy six million of these “data blocks”. At a price of 0.53 euros per brick, to be honest, I have no idea whether such an offer is beneficial or not.

Winner

I often use Cosmos DB, so I am aware of the high prices. Let's try to reserve a database:

At a price of less than 50 thousand euros for 20 thousand RU / s, this is simply a pity. When I tried to reserve five million RU / s, Azure didn’t allow me to do this, because I’m apparently not a “corporate” user:

Fortunately, we can at least estimate the value in the price calculator :

So with a result of almost $ 9.5 million we have a winner! Or is it still not?

Cheating

Some of you, dear readers, are now probably wondering: why be limited to one petabyte? This is a completely logical question! Let's order the maximum storage capacity in Southern Brazil:

It’s a pity that they have only 99 petabytes, so we’ll try to reserve 999 instances of Standard_M416ms_v2:

Not bad at all! However, I don’t have enough money on my card. If you want to verify the payment, please click the "Review + buy" button and tell us how it went.

Conclusion

Please check it yourself and tell us about your experience! But don't be sad if Azure runs out of free space:

Quarantine boredom. How to spend the most money in Azure with one click