Azure winds down its v3 VM generation — Dv3/Ev3 retire in 2029, the NVv3 and NVv4 GPU series are gone today; plus EWS, gpt-5.4-cyber and Publisher reach their dates

Microsoft pushed a cluster of official Azure retirement notices on 30 September, and this time they’re almost all about virtual machines — Azure winding down its v3 compute generation under the VM lifecycle policy. Three are worth permanent pages. All were verified against Microsoft’s server-rendered release-communications API, because the human-facing Azure Updates pages are JavaScript-rendered and don’t fetch cleanly. Layer 1 also surfaced the usual endoflife.date version churn (a far-off MongoDB 9.0 date), which isn’t news; discovery was quiet apart from one unverified reddit thread about DigitalOcean’s open-source credits program, which we’re watching but not publishing without a primary source.

New: Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, and Esv3 retire — 15 November 2029

The one with the broadest reach. The Dv3/Dsv3 (general-purpose) and Ev3/Esv3 (memory-optimized) families are among the most-deployed Azure VM sizes, and all four are retiring on 15 November 2029. Until then they run normally; after the date they’re unsupported, and VMs not transitioned “may be deallocated and ultimately deleted.” Microsoft’s recommended target is the Dsv5 / Esv5 generation. One piece has already landed: since 1 July 2026, one- and three-year Reserved Instances for these series can no longer be purchased or renewed, so the commitment-discount path is now an Azure savings plan trade-in. The date is three years out, but for large fleets this is capacity planning and re-testing, not a one-click resize.

New: NVv3-series GPU VMs retired — 30 September 2026 (done)

Not a deadline — a completed retirement. As of 30 September, Microsoft retired the NVv3-series NVIDIA-GPU VMs (Standard_NV12s_v3 and five siblings) used for visualization and virtual desktops, and set any remaining NVv3 VMs to a deallocated state — they’ve stopped running and lost SLA and support. Deployments that still reference these sizes will now fail. One regional carve-out: customers in Azure UAE North may keep theirs until 31 January 2027. This entry carries detect: fingerprints for the six concrete Standard_NV*_v3 size strings, so the lastcall CLI can flag them if they’re still in your Terraform/Bicep/ARM.

New: NVv4-series GPU VMs retired — 30 September 2026 (done)

The AMD-GPU counterpart, also retired on 30 September. The NVv4-series — eight Standard_NV*_v4 sizes built around partitionable GPUs for virtual desktops — are gone, with any remaining VMs deallocated. The commercial wind-down ran ahead of it: Reserved Instances ended 2 November 2025, Compute Pre-Purchase sales ended 2 June 2026. Azure’s current-generation analogs are the NVads V710 v5 (AMD) and NVadsA10 v5 (NVIDIA) series. This entry, too, is machine-detectable — the eight retiring size strings are fingerprinted.

Departing today — 1 October 2026

Three entries reach their date today (all re-verified against their primary sources before this went out):

• Exchange Web Services in Exchange Online — Microsoft starts blocking EWS requests from non-Microsoft apps today; move to Microsoft Graph. (The Exchange blog is JS-rendered, so our nightly re-verify flags it; the server-rendered meta description still reads “on October 1, 2026, we will start blocking EWS requests,” so the date is confirmed.)
• gpt-5.4-cyber is removed from the OpenAI API — replacement is gpt-5.6-cyber.
• Microsoft Publisher reaches end of life for Microsoft 365 subscribers (the perpetual Office 2021 build follows on 13 October).

Also coming due

Re-verified tonight, all dates unchanged:

• 2 October: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and the GitHub Copilot model deprecations.
• Then: Cloudflare Zero Trust route endpoints (5 Oct), Windows 11 24H2 end of servicing (13 Oct), Cloudflare Workers KV legacy API (15 Oct), Minimus shutdown (22 Oct), OpenAI GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 / o1 / o3 (23 Oct), Consul 1.22 (31 Oct).

Full board with live countdowns on the calendar.