Voice of the DBA

This week I saw an announcement from Azure that you can set up auto-renew subscriptions for your reservations for your resources. This allows you to set up auto-renew for reservations to prevent them from not renewing and being charged at the pay-as-you-go rates. This reminds me of the old Columbia House deals, which I had for both cassettes and CDs. For some time these were good deals for me, but over time, I’d lose track of the subscription, forget to return things, and end up purchasing items I didn’t want.

An auto-renewal is likely both a good idea and a bad one, as I suspect that many organizations lose track of their renewal dates when they have an estate of any size. Administrators or finance people will come and go, and they might not know the history of why we reserved something, like a VM, and could forget to renew these. Often we are still using resources, so renewals make sense.

However, we also stop using resources or don’t use them at the same capacity levels, so perhaps we want to not renew. The docs for this feature note that the renewal creates a new reservation, and this setting can be changed at any time. However, some of the other docs aren’t clear to me. The descriptions read as though someone has an idea about how this works, and they don’t quite clearly detail the workings of the system for readers that are not familiar with this feature.

As an example, the docs say if you enable renewal more than 30 days before expiration, then  you get an email explaining renewal costs. However, with automatic renewal, do you get the email? When are costs disclosed or detailed? Maybe more importantly, the doc notes the price may change between when you lock the renewal price and when the renew time occurs. Does this mean you pay the higher price? Are you notified each year?

Maybe more importantly, if we create resources at different times, can we somehow get renewals dates to align? Whether this comes to finance people or IT people, at some point with a big cloud presence, you might have renewals coming every month or week. Who would be able to track this stuff appropriately if it’s a constant item to check? I can see plenty of people starting to ignore these notices if they come too often. There are other issues as well, such as a SKU being different (or deprecated) over time. Will someone figure out how to upgrade to a newer SKU? If so, will they remember to set auto-renewal? Does this transition to the new SKU?

The documentation is woefully incomplete, though I’d be happy to submit PRs for edits. I just don’t know what the answers are, and I suspect that whoever built this feature might not have thought through all the scenarios. Certainly the individual writing the documentation didn’t.

The cloud is complex, and billing is complex. Tracking and managing this is going to be partially a technical role, and I suspect many of us won’t know what the implications are for the choices we make. I also suspect we’ll get notifications for resources that we have no knowledge of and will need to research more about the item. We’ll become more of a financial DBA over time, which may or may not be the job we want.

Steve Jones