We run SAP AI Lab — two of us, one in ML systems, the other in enterprise information systems. No affiliation with SAP or Microsoft, just a shared habit of reading pricing APIs instead of press releases.

A while back a friend who manages an S/4HANA estate vented the standard complaint: "RISE is one contract, so why does my Azure bill still exist?" That question turned into the most useful arithmetic we've ever done, and it starts with a single flagship VM.

The number that changed our mind about reservations

Azure's largest memory-optimized HANA SKU, Standard_M832is_16_v3 (832 vCPU, 15,200 GiB RAM), lists at $163.856 per hour pay-as-you-go in East US. Same VM, reserved for one year: $834,816 prepaid for the term. Reserved for three years: $1,209,163 .

Do the math against 730 hours a month and the discounts are 41.8% for one year and 71.9% for three years .…