Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
Applications running on App Service V2 plans may incur higher operational costs and degraded performance compared to V3 plans. V2 uses older hardware generations that lack access to platform-level enhancements introduced in V3, including improved cold start times, faster scaling, enhanced networking options, and eligibility for commitment-based discounts.
This inefficiency often arises from legacy deployments or default provisioning choices that haven't been revisited. Without proactive review, teams may continue running production workloads on suboptimal infrastructure-paying more for less performance and missing available savings.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
App Service plans are billed based on:
- Instance size and tier (e.g., Premium v2 vs. Premium v3)
- Provisioned capacity (number of instances)
Additional considerations:
- Premium v2 plans do not support Azure Reservations or Savings Plans
- Premium v3 plans support both, enabling 1-year and 3-year commitment discounts; Premium v4 plans are also eligible for reservations, which cover Premium v3 and later
- Isolated v2 plans already support reservations and savings plans
As a result, Premium v2 plans may be less cost-efficient both from a price-performance and discount eligibility perspective.
How to detect
5 checks to find it in your estate.
- Identify applications hosted on Premium v2 App Service plans
- Check whether the workload is long-running or steady-state but ineligible for reservations
- Determine whether a V3 compatibility review has been completed
- Look for performance symptoms such as slow cold starts or scaling delays
- Assess whether newer App Service features required by the workload are unavailable on V2
How to fix
5 ways to remove the waste.
- Evaluate workload compatibility with Premium v3, Premium v4, or Isolated v2 plans
- Migrate eligible Premium v2 workloads to Premium v3 or Premium v4 to improve performance and unlock reservation eligibility, plus Azure savings plan for compute eligibility on Premium v3 (Microsoft documents the savings plan only for Premium v3 and Isolated v2 plans)
- Consider 1-year or 3-year commitments for predictable workloads after migration
- Update infrastructure-as-code templates and provisioning defaults to prefer V3-based plans
- Periodically review App Service plan usage to align with current Azure best practices
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.