Azure pricing API quotes SKUs that arent deployable
Recommending a VM size upgrade to a user, then discovering the chosen SKU is blocked at deploy time
The Azure retail pricing API (prices.azure.com) and the Azure pricing calculator BOTH cheerfully quote prices for VM SKUs that are not actually deployable in a given subscription. There is no quota or subscription-availability signal in the retail pricing response — you can spend an entire conversation comparing PAYG and reservation rates between candidate SKUs only to discover at deploy time that az vm list-skus returns RESTRICTED:NotAvailableForSubscription for the one you picked. This bites particularly hard on newer VM generations (e.g. Dpsv6 ARM SKUs were restricted while Dpsv5 was AVAILABLE in the same subscription/region). ALWAYS run az vm list-skus --location <region> --size <full SKU name> -o json and check restrictions[].reasonCode BEFORE recommending a target SKU for resize, migration, or reservation purchase. Otherwise you commit a user to a discount plan that cannot apply.
As the first step when advising on Azure VM sizing, list deployable SKUs in the customer s subscription/region using az vm list-skus and filter to ones with empty restrictions[]. Treat the retail pricing API and pricing calculator as price oracles only, not as availability oracles.