Corey Quinn twitted this yesterday:

The twit was followed by a very productive discussion, with many nice people trying to figure out even better ways to spend money on AWS. As an Azure user, I felt sad and left out, so I decided to fix this injustice. If you are in quarantine and you have insane amounts of money to spend, I got you covered: you only need one Pay-As-You-Go Azure subscription, and I promise I’ll help you make all your hard-earned money disappear in a second!

Warming up

The first thing any sane person would try to do when attempting to burn money using any cloud provider is to buy a very large and expensive virtual machine. Sadly, this will get you nowhere:

One Standard_M416ms_v2 instance with 416 vCPUs and 11,400 GB of RAM paid three years upfront will only cost you 802K, which is not even a million! To make things worse, Azure is giving you 71% discount, and savings are completely opposite of what we are trying to achieve. Credit where credit is due: Azure says that the recommended quantity of these instances for me is zero, which is a pretty accurate guess.

Breaking 1M (Azure Blob Storage)

How about Azure Blob Storage? Usually, it’s very cheap, but what if for some reason you need to store one petabyte of data in south Brazil for the next three years?

Unfortunately, you can only get read-access geo-redundant storage here, which leaves you wondering what would be the price for read-access geo-zone-redundant storage if it was available.

Breaking 1M (Azure Databricks)

Our next candidate is Azure Databricks. I have no idea what it is, and I don’t even care! All I know is that it’s pretty expensive, and that’s exactly what I need:

Three million euros will buy you more than six million of these bricks of data. At 0.53 EUR per brick, I honestly don’t know if this is a good deal or not.

The winner

I use Cosmos DB a lot, and I know that it can get pretty expensive, so I tried to reserve some capacity:

At less than 50K EUR for 20K RU/s, this is pathetic. When I tried to reserve 5M RU/s, Azure didn’t let me do it, because apparently I’m not “enterprise” enough:

Luckily, we can at least get an estimate by using Azure pricing calculator:

At more then 9M USD, we have a winner! Or do we?

Cheating

Some of you dear readers are now probably asking: why would you limit yourself to a single petabyte of data? That’s a completely legitimate question! Let’s take all petabytes available in south Brazil:

It’s a shame they only have 99 of them petabytes, so let’s try to reserve 999 Standard_M416ms_v2 instances:

Not bad! However, I don’t have enough money on my card to test if this operation will succeed. If you do, please click “Review + buy” and tell me what happened.

Conclusion

Please do this at home, and tell me your experience! Just don’t be sad if some of these ways don’t work for you right now: