Microsoft
Microsoft
MicrosoftHello rmmartins. This article is conflating Azure capacity and subscription-level quota. Having quota will not prevent an Azure capacity issue from ruining someone's day. They are distinctly different things, but one walks away from this article thinking they are the same.
The article repeatedly refers to “capacity” problems, but the examples and explanations mix together Azure regional capacity and subscription-level quota as if they’re the same thing. They are not. They are completely different failure modes with completely different causes and entirely different remediation paths.
Quota errors happen when a subscription doesn’t have enough vCPU allowance.
Capacity errors happen when Azure doesn’t have physical hardware available in that region.
There is currently no way for Azure customers to check if there is capacity for a VM SKU, except for attempting a deployment and getting an error. Only quota can be checked. Please adjust the article accordingly to avoid contributing to this common misconception.
MicrosoftThanks for the thoughtful feedback. You’re absolutely right that subscription-level quota and physical Azure capacity are distinct failure modes, with different causes and remediation paths.
The intent of the article was not to suggest they are the same internally, nor that quota guarantees deployability. The goal was to focus on the operator’s perspective. What signals can be observed, monitored, and correlated when VM deployments start to fail at scale.
From an operational standpoint, both quota exhaustion and regional capacity shortages ultimately surface as deployment failures that block VM creation, and the article deliberately looks at telemetry, allocation errors, and trends that help teams anticipate and reason about capacity risk, not to pre-validate physical capacity availability.
I agree it would be useful to make this distinction more explicit in the wording to avoid confusion, and I appreciate you calling it out. I’ll look at clarifying that “capacity” in this context refers to the practical ability to successfully deploy a VM SKU, which can be constrained by either quota or physical availability, even though they are separate mechanisms under the hood.
Thanks again for the constructive discussion.