Hi Martin, Thank you for your help. You can indeed separate two challenges: "More precise infrastructure estimation" I am looking for end-users, Microsoft staff or consultants understanding the costs in relationship to what is actually required. I am not looking for high availability if it is not needed. It is a business case what makes sense. Everybody wants 24x7 up, but that comes at a price. And since Microsoft comes with tons of servers, it is costly. I guess getting open and critical feedback from an end customer is happy feedback for every organisation. I can learn here and also Microsoft and other (potential) customers can share their thoughts. "Azure looks expensive to me" I know a bunch of end customers who run AX or want to start an AX implementation and choose NOT to run in Azure because a private cloud is cheaper. A lot of MS partners also advice NOT to go into Azure of its costs. I have taken the challenge to have a look if we can go forward with Azure. It might look like complaining, but if I would be like the other companies and go for a private cloud silently. Nobody would have read about my thoughts and why I decided so. Every company has to make a business case: revenue - costs = profit. We have to make such business case too. Most CIO's, ICT Managers do not bother at all or are reluctant to start a conversation like this. I am not. I like the challenge to change things. I am sure a lot of Microsoft guys also read this forum post. The question is if they are able to change things in a slow moving organisation like Microsoft. Eventually the market will make Microsoft change prices and lower them. By raising my voice I hope others pick up my signal and help me getting what I want to achieve. If you look at what native cloud costs (for instance Azure SQL database and App service) A native cloud does not use any server, but is a pure HA services you subscribe on. AX is after years of cloud presence still a lot of servers, storage and CPU cores. That is extremely costly. If you look at the two Enterprise SQL licenses needed for AX to have it HA, the SQL Azure pricing is much cheaper and comes with HA too. And with SQL Azure you do not have any server maintenance at all. My question is when AX will become SAAS. Then I guess it will become cheap since in SAAS you can scale much more dynamically with cores than by scaling VM's. So, I am interesting to get in contact with end customers running AX in Azure and what sizing they use. I have seen on Customer Source that in LCS there is a sizing estimator. I will try that. My request to Microsoft is to give all server and SQL licenses free to customers who are business ready, so they only pay for the SAAS. Or only pay for half of the setup or be able to run half of the setup. It becomes in this way more open source. And that is exactly where a lot of the world (and Microsoft former customers) are heading to. Another option is like a firewall cluster active-passive or active-active cluster with less capacity in which you replace the broken firewall with a new one and meanwhile running on only one. Why can't Azure run this way? That will save half of the cost of a HA cluster as currently sized. Or create a Azure subscription with a certain fixed amount of downtime at night or in the weekend in which maintenance is done. And with a SLA response time to fix a broken server? Anyhow, I am open for discussion and to learn from others how they challenged this situation and what they decided. I have to decide within a couple of days. J.
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