Check your regions people

Today I was having a nice discussion with some colleagues about Fabric and pricing/licensing came up. I mentioned an F2 is only around €250 a month, but a colleague said “no no, it’s over €300”.

A bit confused, I pulled up the sizing table of my Fabric capacity in Azure, which looks like this:

Similarly, my colleague did the same for his capacity:

Weird right? Turns out I created a capacity in the region North Europe, while they created a capacity in West Europe. That’s almost 14% discount, just by selecting a different region! On an F2 capacity this doesn’t seem to be much, but on higher capacity this is quite a difference (e.g. around €1300 for an F64, which is over 15K per year).

Of course, a bit more thought should go into selecting a region than just the price of a Fabric capacity. Is the “cheaper” region acceptable towards latency and other SLAs? Are there already other Azure resources which are on another region? You definitely don’t want egress fees between the regions (depends on the Availability Zones). But for greenfield projects, it might be worth checking out the pricing differences between applicable regions.