Forum Discussion
Azure sponsorship and cost management challenge
Hrvoje Kusulja This is the teams response:
We are currently transitioning customers to a newer Sponsorship experience where Azure Sponsorship credits and usage can be viewed directly in Cost Management.
As a quick way to check which experience you are currently using, please visit microsoftazuresponsorships.com/usage. If your usage is only visible there, you are likely using the previous Sponsorship platform.
In the newer Sponsorship experience, you can view Sponsorship credit usage directly in Cost Management by navigating to Billing Profiles and then Payment Methods. This experience also enables access to additional Cost Management capabilities and reporting features.
If you are currently using the previous Sponsorship platform, access to the newer experience typically occurs when a new Sponsorship is provisioned or redeemed.
It's my impression or this is a complete mess now? sponsorship credits are still opaque and tools to monitor usage did not evolve at all (https://www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com/Usage still not integrated or detailed as in azure cost management). Since Feb that we are waiting for the "new" tools to manage usage and credits.
Bulk credits is not the same thing as the 150usd/month/user because now managers will defensibly remove credits from employees (blast radius of a bad dev decision is huge). People will simply stop exploring any new Azure service - it eats precious resources so teams will condemn any experimentation now!
Moving resources to managed subscriptions (aka critical Dev environments) will not work as many Azure Services still don't support migrations.
Telling developers to use mostly Free Services https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-services is also not working when they create Trial subscriptions (actually I'm facing this in a client were we could not find any quota for F(free) app services - another lie!)
This will be a huge give-away of developer love to competitors: Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlifly, Supabase, ...
Partner Program used to be about "demonstrating competencies/certifications" and nowadays is just about paying fees and achieving sales/commissions just like any other employee at Microsoft.
Hope someone at Microsoft will read this (With so many layoffs, probably one day a Claude session will use this when trying to dig the reasons why partners left the platform)