Sysadmin Central

As Azure evolves, so does its pricing models, often leaving legacy pricing plans in place for existing customers. While these older plans may still function, they can result in unnecessary costs and limit access to newer, more powerful compute resources.

Many organizations continue running their Azure Web Apps on outdated Standard (S1, S2, S3) or Premium v2 (P1v2, P2v2, P3v2) plans without realizing the potential savings and performance boosts that can come from upgrading.

In this post, I’ll walk through how to identify legacy pricing plans and why making a switch can be both cost-effective and performance-enhancing.

Identifying Legacy Pricing Plans

Before making any decisions, it’s important to determine whether your Web Apps are running on legacy pricing plans. There are multiple ways to do this efficiently:

Using Azure Resource Graph Explorer

Azure Resource Graph Explorer can provide a brilliant view across multiple subscriptions.

The following query will list all App Services and their SKU’s, filtering out common modern SKU’s.

resources
| where type == 'microsoft.web/serverfarms'
| where sku.tier != 'Dynamic' and sku.tier != 'Free' and sku.tier != 'ElasticPremium' and sku.tier != 'Basic' and sku.tier != 'PremiumV3' and sku.tier != 'Premium0V3' and sku.tier != 'FlexConsumption'
| project name, sku.tier, sku.name

Using the Azure Portal

• Navigate to the Azure Portal.
• Open the App Services blade and select your Web App or Function App.
• Check the associated App Service Plan under the Scale Up (App Service Plan) section.
• If the plan shows under the Legacy heading then you can likely update to a modern equivalent that often provides greater compute power at a similar or lower price.

Using Azure CLI

You can also use Azure CLI, however it will only return App Services in the current subscription scope –

az appservice plan list --query "[].{Name:name, Tier:sku.tier, Size:sku.size}" --output table

Why Upgrading Makes Sense

Many organizations hesitate to change pricing plans due to fear of increased costs or potential downtime. However, in most cases, switching from a legacy plan to a newer pricing tier results in lower or equivalent costs and higher performance.

Any price savings will depend on the pricing model of the Azure subscription though, those utilising DevTest pricing especially will likely see significant cost savings in some cases.

How to Upgrade Your App Service Plans

If you’ve identified legacy pricing plans and are ready to upgrade, upgrading tends to be really simple –

1. Navigate to Azure Portal, App Service, then Scale Up (App Service Plan).
2. Select a Newer Plan (eg. Premium v3).
3. Confirm and Apply the Upgrade.

Do be warned that resizing an App Service is liable to restart the application, although as far as I can see this normally takes seconds at most.

Further details may be found on Microsoft learn – Scale up an app in Azure App Service