Azure OpenAI deployment types

Azure OpenAI provides customers with choices on the hosting structure that fits their business and usage patterns. The service offers two main types of deployments: standard and provisioned. For a given deployment type, customers can align their workloads with their data processing requirements by choosing an Azure geography (Standard or Provisioned), Microsoft specified data zone (DataZone-Standard), or Global (Global-Standard or Global Provisioned-Managed) processing options.

All deployments can perform the exact same inference operations, however the billing, scale, and performance are substantially different. As part of your solution design, you will need to make two key decisions:

• Data processing location
• Call volume

Azure OpenAI Deployment Data Processing Locations

For standard deployments, there are three deployment type options to choose from - global, data zone, and Azure geography. For provisioned deployments, there are two deployment type options to choose from - global and Azure geography. Global standard is the recommended starting point.

Global deployments leverage Azure's global infrastructure to dynamically route customer traffic to the data center with the best availability for the customer’s inference requests. This means you will get the highest initial throughput limits and best model availability with Global while still providing our uptime SLA and low latency. For high volume workloads above the specified usage tiers on standard and global standard, you may experience increased latency variation. For customers that require the lower latency variance at large workload usage, we recommend leveraging our provisioned deployment types.

Our global deployments will be the first location for all new models and features. Depending on call volume, customers with large volume and low latency variance requirements should consider our provisioned deployment types.

Data zone deployments leverage Azure's global infrastructure to dynamically route customer traffic to the data center with the best availability for the customer's inference requests within the data zone defined by Microsoft. Positioned between our Azure geography and Global deployment offerings, data zone deployments provide elevated quota limits while keeping data processing within the Microsoft specified data zone. Data stored at rest will continue to remain in the geography of the Azure OpenAI resource (e.g., for an Azure OpenAI resource created in the Sweden Central Azure region, the Azure geography is Sweden).

If the Azure OpenAI resource used in your Data Zone deployment is located in the United States, the data will be processed within the United States. If the Azure OpenAI resource used in your Data Zone deployment is located in a European Union Member Nation, the data will be processed within the European Union Member Nation geographies. For all Azure OpenAI service deployment types, any data stored at rest will continue to remain in the geography of the Azure OpenAI resource. Azure data processing and compliance commitments remain applicable.

For any deployment type labeled 'Global,' prompts and responses may be processed in any geography where the relevant Azure OpenAI model is deployed (learn more about region availability of models). For any deployment type labeled as 'DataZone,' prompts and responses may be processed in any geography within the specified data zone, as defined by Microsoft. If you create a DataZone deployment in an Azure OpenAI resource located in the United States, prompts and responses may be processed anywhere within the United States. If you create a DataZone deployment in an Azure OpenAI resource located in a European Union Member Nation, prompts and responses may be processed in that or any other European Union Member Nation. For both Global and DataZone deployment types, any data stored at rest, such as uploaded data, is stored in the customer-designated geography. Only the location of processing is affected when a customer uses a Global deployment type or DataZone deployment type in Azure OpenAI Service; Azure data processing and compliance commitments remain applicable.

Deployment types

Azure OpenAI offers three types of deployments. These provide a varied level of capabilities that provide trade-offs on: throughput, SLAs, and price. Below is a summary of the options followed by a deeper description of each.

Offering	Global-Batch	Global-Standard	Global-Provisioned	Standard	Provisioned
Best suited for	Offline scoring Workloads that are not latency sensitive and can be completed in hours.	Recommended starting place for customers. Global-Standard will have the higher default quota and larger number of models available than Standard.	Real-time scoring for large consistent volume. Includes the highest commitments and limits.	For customers with data residency requirements. Optimized for low to medium volume.	Real-time scoring for large consistent volume. Includes the highest commitments and limits. For use cases with data residency requirements
How it works	Offline processing via files	Traffic may be routed anywhere in the world	Traffic may be routed anywhere in the world
Getting started	Global-Batch	Model deployment	Provisioned onboarding	Model deployment	Provisioned onboarding
Cost	Least expensive option 50% less cost compared to Global Standard prices. Access to all new models with larger quota allocations.	Global deployment pricing	May experience cost savings for consistent usage	Regional pricing	May experience cost savings for consistent usage
What you get	Significant discount compared to Global Standard	Easy access to all new models with the highest default pay-per-call limits. Customers with high volume usage may see higher latency variability	Access to high & predictable throughput across Azure global infrastructure. Determine throughput per PTU using the provided capacity calculator.	SLA on availability. Optimized for low to medium volume workloads with high burstiness. Customers with high consistent volume may experience greater latency variability.	Regional access with very high & predictable throughput. Determine throughput per PTU using the provided capacity calculator
What you don’t get	❌Real-time call performance ❌Data processing guarantee Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location. Learn more about data residency	❌Data processing guarantee Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location. Learn more about data residency	❌Pay-per-call flexibility ❌Data processing guarantee Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location. Learn more about data residency	❌High volume w/consistent low latency	❌Pay-per-call flexibility
Per-call Latency	Not Applicable (file based async process)	Optimized for real-time calling & low to medium volume usage. Customers with high volume usage may see higher latency variability. Threshold set per model	Optimized for real-time calling & high-volume usage.	Optimized for real-time calling & low to medium volume usage. Customers with high volume usage may see higher latency variability. Threshold set per model	Optimized for real-time calling & high-volume usage.
Sku Name in code	GlobalBatch	GlobalStandard	GlobalProvisionedManaged	Standard	ProvisionedManaged
Billing model	Pay-per-token	Pay-per-token	Hourly billing with optional purchase of monthly or yearly reservations	Pay-per-token	Hourly billing with optional purchase of monthly or yearly reservations

Global standard

Important

Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location. Learn more about data residency.

Global deployments are available in the same Azure OpenAI resources as non-global deployment types but allow you to leverage Azure's global infrastructure to dynamically route traffic to the data center with best availability for each request. Global standard provides the highest default quota and eliminates the need to load balance across multiple resources.

Customers with high consistent volume may experience greater latency variability. The threshold is set per model. See the quotas page to learn more. For applications that require the lower latency variance at large workload usage, we recommend purchasing provisioned throughput.

Global provisioned

Important

Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location. Learn more about data residency.

Global deployments are available in the same Azure OpenAI resources as non-global deployment types but allow you to leverage Azure's global infrastructure to dynamically route traffic to the data center with best availability for each request. Global provisioned deployments provide reserved model processing capacity for high and predictable throughput using Azure global infrastructure.

Global batch

Important

Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location. Learn more about data residency.

Global batch is designed to handle large-scale and high-volume processing tasks efficiently. Process asynchronous groups of requests with separate quota, with 24-hour target turnaround, at 50% less cost than global standard. With batch processing, rather than send one request at a time you send a large number of requests in a single file. Global batch requests have a separate enqueued token quota avoiding any disruption of your online workloads.

Key use cases include:

• Large-Scale Data Processing: Quickly analyze extensive datasets in parallel.

• Content Generation: Create large volumes of text, such as product descriptions or articles.

• Document Review and Summarization: Automate the review and summarization of lengthy documents.

• Customer Support Automation: Handle numerous queries simultaneously for faster responses.

• Data Extraction and Analysis: Extract and analyze information from vast amounts of unstructured data.

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tasks: Perform tasks like sentiment analysis or translation on large datasets.

• Marketing and Personalization: Generate personalized content and recommendations at scale.

Data zone standard

Important

Data stored at rest remains in the designated Azure geography, while data may be processed for inferencing in any Azure OpenAI location within the Microsoft specified data zone. Learn more about data residency.

Data zone standard deployments are available in the same Azure OpenAI resource as all other Azure OpenAI deployment types but allow you to leverage Azure global infrastructure to dynamically route traffic to the data center within the Microsoft defined data zone with the best availability for each request. Data zone standard provides higher default quotas than our Azure geography-based deployment types.

Customers with high consistent volume may experience greater latency variability. The threshold is set per model. See the Quotas and limits page to learn more. For workloads that require low latency variance at large volume, we recommend leveraging the provisioned deployment offerings.

Standard

Standard deployments provide a pay-per-call billing model on the chosen model. Provides the fastest way to get started as you only pay for what you consume. Models available in each region as well as throughput may be limited.

Standard deployments are optimized for low to medium volume workloads with high burstiness. Customers with high consistent volume may experience greater latency variability.

Provisioned

Provisioned deployments allow you to specify the amount of throughput you require in a deployment. The service then allocates the necessary model processing capacity and ensures it's ready for you. Throughput is defined in terms of provisioned throughput units (PTU) which is a normalized way of representing the throughput for your deployment. Each model-version pair requires different amounts of PTU to deploy and provide different amounts of throughput per PTU. Learn more from our Provisioned throughput concepts article.

How to disable access to global deployments in your subscription

Azure Policy helps to enforce organizational standards and to assess compliance at-scale. Through its compliance dashboard, it provides an aggregated view to evaluate the overall state of the environment, with the ability to drill down to the per-resource, per-policy granularity. It also helps to bring your resources to compliance through bulk remediation for existing resources and automatic remediation for new resources. Learn more about Azure Policy and specific built-in controls for AI services.

You can use the following policy to disable access to Azure OpenAI global standard deployments. To disable access to Azure global provisioned or global batch deployments, replace GlobalStandard with GlobalProvisionedManaged or GlobalBatch for the intended sku name.

{
    "mode": "All",
    "policyRule": {
        "if": {
            "allOf": [
                {
                    "field": "type",
                    "equals": "Microsoft.CognitiveServices/accounts/deployments"
                },
                {
                    "field": "Microsoft.CognitiveServices/accounts/deployments/sku.name",
                    "equals": "GlobalStandard"
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

Deploy models

To learn about creating resources and deploying models refer to the resource creation guide.

See also

• Quotas & limits
• Provisioned throughput units (PTU) onboarding
• Provisioned throughput units (PTU) getting started