Microsoft Retiring... IP Addresses

If you had this on your 2022 IT bingo card, well done, you probably should try the lottery. If you’re less psychically gifted however, this announcement is slightly bizarre. Microsoft announced yesterday that they’re intending to retire their Basic SKU IP Addresses. Here’s everything we need to know.

Basic SKU only, Standard SKU Unaffected

It wouldn’t be much of a cloud if we couldn’t access it, so don’t worry, only Basic SKUs will be impacted by this change. Microsoft have announced that on the 30th September 2025, Basic SKU IP addresses will be retired.

Further, from the 31st March 2025, you won’t be able to provision new Basic SKU IP addresses.

How do these SKUs differ?

Static/Dynamic IP Addresses

All IP Address allocations are static within the Standard SKU, whereas the Basic SKU offers Dynamic/Static for IPv4 and Dynamic is the only option for IPv6.

Security Model

Standard SKU IP Addresses follow the ‘Secure-by-Default’ model. This means it’s mandatory to utilise a Network Security Group (NSG) to allow inbound traffic to your Public IP Address. Whereas the use of an NSG is optional with the Basic SKU, instead opting for an ‘Open-by-Default’ model.

Routing Preference

Ever wanted to have all of your WAN traffic to Azure traverse the internet as close as possible to Microsoft before transitioning to the Microsoft network? Me neither, but it’s an option! I understand there are genuine reasons why this would be preferrable for some. This option can provide more optimised costs for organisations, but I’m still strongly an advocate for the improved performance that Microsoft’s global backbone provides, especially over longer distances between user(s) and services.

Real-World Example: I was utilising a leased-line provider with a 1Gbps connection, and needed to shift traffic between continents. I was seeing throughput of between 5-15Mbps on the leased-line natively due to the poor peering options provided, combined with the relatively restrictive cross-regional bandwidth available at this destination. When I migrated over to routing via Microsoft, I saw the traffic throughput increase to an average speed of 700Mbps. Yes, it can really be that impactful, and, in my opinion, well worth the slight cost increase.

Interested in reading more about routing preference? Check out Microsoft’s article here. Interested in seeing the epic, and ever-growing peering options available within Microsoft’s backbone? Check out Microsoft’s PeeringDB organisation page, and especially look at their ASN8075.

Availability Zones

Standard SKU IP Addresses can support being zonal, non-zonal, or zone-redundant. I would like to call out however that when we look at upgrading the IP address from Basic to Standard SKU, you still won’t be able to configure this, post-upgrade. It will be necessary to provision a new Standard SKU IP Address to leverage this functionality.

Further Reading

Also available are Global Tier features for Standard SKU IP Addresses, but I won’t dive into this as this is necessary for cross-region load balancers, so you wouldn’t have provisioned this with a Basic SKU IP address and be looking for an upgrade path…

For more information on Azure IP Addresses, check out the Microsoft Learn link here.

What will this cost?

As always, the pricing is subject to change, but the costs between Basic & Standard aren’t substantial, but it could still add a few £’s to your bill. Please see the following table from Microsoft:

You can review an up-to-date version of this table yourself, here.

Based on the rates above, 1x Static IP address takes you from £2.22 per month, to £3.09 per month, at the time of writing. This can be validated for your particular requirements by using the Azure pricing calculator, here.

I’d like to close this segment out by reminding you that it is possible to deploy virtual machines without public IP addresses, and I suggest considering whether a public IP address is actually needed for your VM or service before allocating one, it saves money, and improves security by controlling ingress & egress.

The Upgrade Path from Basic to Standard SKU

With all of our information gathered, we can now proceed to perform an upgrade. How do we do this?

I was originally going to provide some guidance on this, but Microsoft have (brilliantly) already created resources to show you how to upgrade, whether you want to upgrade via the Azure Portal, PowerShell or Azure CLI, there’s an option for everyone.

Before upgrading, please check out Microsoft’s general guidance on this topic.

Then visit one of the below, based on how you wish to upgrade.

• Azure Portal
• PowerShell
• Azure CLI

How do I know if I am using Basic or Standard SKU IP Addresses?

Via the Azure Portal

Jump over to https://portal.azure.com, and search for ‘Public IP Addresses’. From here, you have three options.

1. Utilise the group dropdown and select ‘Group by SKU’, this will organise your list of IP addresses into sub-groups of Basic and Standard SKUs.
2. Utilise the ‘Add Filter’ function, and add a filter with the filter set to ‘SKU’, operator set to ‘Equals’, and Value set to ‘Basic’.
3. Utilise the ‘Manage View’ option, edit columns, and add a column of ‘SKU’.
4. In all of these scenarios, you can then export this list, if necessary, by selecting ‘Export to CSV’.

Via PowerShell / Azure Shell

To get a list of Basic SKU IP Addresses via PowerShell or Azure Shell, run the following cmdlets:

#Connect to Azure
Connect-AzureAccount
#Gather the IP Address Resource Name & SKU, Proactively rename the 'Name' Field to 'IP Address Name' to avoid conflict, Expand the SKU property, Filter Results
Get-AzPublicIpAddress | Select-Object -Property @{name='IPAddress Name'; expr={$_.Name}} -ExpandProperty Sku | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "Basic"}

You could even swap the second cmdlet with the below to export to CSV! (PowerShell Only)

Get-AzPublicIpAddress | Select-Object -Property @{name='IPAddress Name'; expr={$_.Name}} -ExpandProperty Sku | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "Basic"} | Export-CSV output.csv -NoTypeInformation

I’m not quite sure what to, how can I get help?

Microsoft have a specific support problem subtype for this topic, so raise a support request as usual. Then follow the below steps (copied from Microsoft directly!):

1. For Summary, type a description of your issue.
2. For Issue type, select Technical.
3. For Subscription, select your subscription.
4. For Service, select My services.
5. For Service type, then select IP Services.
6. For Problem type, select Public IP Addresses.
7. For Problem subtype, select Upgrade from Basic to Standard.

If you have any CSP licensing, you’ll likely need to raise this via your reseller, the path for raising this will vary by supplier so you’ll need to adapt this to your own personal requirements.