Invoicing
Azure's billing system also provides information about invoices that are generated monthly.
Depending on the offer type, the method of invoicing may vary. For pay-as-you-go users, the invoices will be sent monthly to the account administrator. However, for EA customers, the invoice will be sent to the contact on the enrollment.
Clicking on the Invoices menu brings up a list of all the invoices generated, and clicking on any of the invoices provides details about that invoice. Figure 6.8 shows how the invoices are shown in the Azure portal:
Figure 6.8: List of invoices and their details
There are two types of invoices: one is for Azure services such as SQL, Virtual Machines, and Networking. Another type is for Azure Marketplace and Reservations. Azure Marketplace provides partner services from different vendors for customers. We will be talking about Azure Reservations later on.
By default, for a pay-as-you-go subscription, the account admin has access to the invoices. If they want, they can delegate access to other users, such as the organization's finance team, by choosing the Access invoice option in Figure 6.8. Additionally, the account admin can opt for email addresses where they want to send out the copies of the invoices.
The Email Invoice option is not available for Support Plan now. Alternatively, you can visit the Accounts portal and download the invoice. Microsoft is slowly moving away from this portal, and most of the features are getting deprecated as they are integrated into the Azure portal.
So far, we have discussed subscriptions and how invoicing is done. Something new that has been introduced by Microsoft is Modern Commerce. With this new commerce experience, the purchase process and experience has been simplified. Let's take a closer look at Modern Commerce and learn how it is different from the legacy platform that we have discussed so far.
The Modern Commerce experience
If your organization is already working with Microsoft, you will know that there are multiple agreements involved for each offer, such as Web Direct, EAs, CSP, Microsoft Service and Product Agreement (MSPA), Server Cloud Enrollments (SCE), and so on. Along with this, each of them has its own portal; for example, EAs have the EA portal, CSP has the Partner Center portal, and Volume Licensing has its own portal too.
Each offer comes with a different set of terms and conditions, and the customers need to go through them every time they make a purchase. The transition from one offer to another is not very easy as each offer has a different set of terms and conditions. Let's imagine that you already have an EA subscription and would like to convert it to a CSP subscription; you may have to delete some of the partner services as they are not supported in CSP. For each product, each offer will have different rules. From a customer standpoint, it's very hard to understand what supports what and how rules differ.
Addressing this issue, Microsoft has recently issued a new agreement called Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA). This will act as the basic terms and conditions. You can make amendments to it whenever required when you sign up for a new program.
For Azure, there will be three Go-To-Market (GTM) programs:
Field Led: Customers will interact directly with the Microsoft Accounts Team and the billing will be directly managed by Microsoft. Eventually, this will replace EAs.
Partner Led: This is equivalent to the Azure-in-CSP program, where a partner manages your billing. There are different partners across the world. A quick web search will help you find the partners around you. This program will replace the Azure-in-CSP program. As the first step to Modern Commerce, a partner will sign a Microsoft Partner Agreement (MPA) with Microsoft and transition their existing customers by making them sign the MCA. At the time of writing this book, many partners have transitioned their customers to Modern Commerce, and the new commerce experience is available in 139 countries.
Self Service: This will be a replacement for Web Direct. It doesn't require any involvement from the partner or the Microsoft Accounts Team. Customers can directly purchase from microsoft.com and they will sign the MCA during the purchase.
In Azure, the billing will be done on the Azure Plan, and the billing will be always aligned with the calendar month. Buying an Azure Plan is very similar to buying any other subscription. The difference is that the MCA will be signed during the process.
Azure Plan can host multiple subscriptions, and it will act as a root-level container. All the usage is tied back to a single Azure Plan. All the subscriptions inside the Azure Plan will act as containers to host services, such as Virtual Machines, SQL Database, and Networking.
Some of the changes and advancements we could observe after the introduction of Modern Commerce are as follows:
Eventually, the portals will be deprecated. For example, earlier EA customers were only able to download the enrollment usage information from the EA portal. Now Microsoft has integrated it into Azure Cost Management with a richer experience than the EA portal.
Pricing will be done in USD and billed in the local currency. If your currency is not USD, then the foreign exchange (FX) rate will be applied and is available in your invoice. Microsoft uses FX rates from Thomson Reuters, and these rates will be assigned on the first of every month. This value will be consistent throughout the month, irrespective of what the market rate is.
CSP customers who transition to the new Azure Plan will be able to use Cost Management. Access to Cost Management opens a new world of cost tracking, as it provides access to all native Cost Management features.
All the subscriptions that we have discussed so far will eventually be moved to an Azure Plan, which is the future of Azure. Now that you understand the basics of Modern Commerce, let's discuss another topic that has a very important role when we are architecting solutions. Most services have limits by default; some of these limits can be increased while some are hard limits. When we are architecting a solution, we need to make sure that there is ample quota. Capacity planning is a vital part of architectural design. In the next section, you will learn more about limits on subscriptions.