Azure VMware Solution retires its license-included SKUs — PayGo on 15 October 2026, everything else on 30 August 2027, as Broadcom's licensing change forces BYOL

Tonight the monitored registry caught a real new one: Microsoft is retiring the license-included commercial model for Azure VMware Solution (AVS). The pay-as-you-go license-included SKUs retire 15 October 2026 and all remaining license-included services — Reserved Instance SKUs, the AV36 SKU, the lot — retire 30 August 2027, a downstream effect of Broadcom's November 2025 VMware Cloud Foundation licensing change. AVS itself continues, but only under bring-your-own-license, so existing customers face a forced re-purchase of portable Broadcom licenses with real procurement lead time. Verified against Microsoft's release-communications API. 56 sources fetched clean; every sub-30-day entry re-checked against its primary source.

The monitored registry did its job tonight: 56 sources fetched clean, and the Layer-1 diff surfaced one genuinely new retirement worth the top of the digest.

Azure VMware Solution is retiring its license-included SKUs. Microsoft is ending the commercial model where the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) license is bundled into the price you pay Microsoft for AVS. This is a downstream effect of Broadcom’s November 2025 licensing change, which now requires customers to bring their own portable VCF license across every hyperscaler. AVS itself isn’t shutting down — it continues under a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) model — but the bundled SKUs most existing customers bought on are going away.

Two dates, and the nearer one is easy to miss:

15 October 2026 — the license-included pay-as-you-go (PayGo) SKUs retire. If you run AVS license-included on PayGo, that’s your clock.
30 August 2027 — all remaining license-included services retire, including the Reserved Instance (RI) SKUs and the AV36 SKU. Service disruption for anyone still on a license-included RI SKU begins 31 August 2027.

The catch is lead time: the bottleneck is Broadcom license procurement, not an Azure toggle. Microsoft’s own guidance is to assess your environment now, buy portable VCF licenses, and transition to the AVS VCF BYOL SKU (or plan an exit) well ahead of your applicable date. RI holders can exchange reservations with expirations beyond 30 August 2027. We verified every date against Microsoft’s release-communications API — the same clean source we use whenever an Azure Updates page renders its dates in JavaScript.

Every entry with a sunset date inside 30 days was re-checked against its primary source first — eleven entries, all confirmed unchanged. (The Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector’s 14 September date was again re-confirmed against Microsoft’s release-communications API, since its Azure Updates page renders the date in JavaScript our fetcher can’t see.)

Still counting down

OpenAI Assistants API — 26 August, removed from the API in favor of the Responses API.
Convictional — 27 August, the B2B trade platform’s access ends.
OCI DevOps OL7 build runners — 28 August.
GitHub Spark, Flowise, the New Relic drop-filter-rules API, and the Power Automate mobile app — all 31 August.

Further out: OpenSSL 3.0 (7 September), the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation (10 September), the Relay paid shutdown and the Microsoft Sentinel SAP agent retirement (both 14 September), the OpenAI Sora 2 video API (24 September), the Azure Automation runtime cut-off (30 September), the new EWS in Exchange Online block (1 October), the Cloudflare Workers KV legacy API (15 October), the Azure Databricks Runtime 10.4 LTS end of life (1 November), and the Azure Blueprints retirement (31 January 2027). The full board, with countdowns, is on the calendar.

Want this in your own repo instead of your inbox? The lastcall CLI — npx lastcall.dev check — scans a project and tells you which of your dependencies has an announced end date, reading the same public dataset this site is built on.