Azure UK South Capacity Pressures & How to Protect Your Workloads.
by Kyle Van Der Linde
Practical guidance from Bechtle to keep your Azure services reliable during UK South capacity constraints.
If your organisation relies on the Azure UK South region, you’ve likely noticed increased capacity pressure over recent months. Microsoft is restricting new customer subscriptions and manually reviewing all quota requests rather than auto-approving them. UK South is one of Microsoft’s busiest European regions, and due to exceptional demand, customers may experience allocation failures, difficulty deploying new VM sizes, or delays when scaling workloads.
At Bechtle, we’re working closely with Microsoft and proactively helping customers avoid disruption. Below is our clear, practical guidance on how to stay protected during capacity constrained periods in UK South.
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Why this matters?
When UK South becomes capacity‑limited, actions such as creating, starting, or resizing VMs may fail with messages like AllocationFailed or ZonalAllocationFailed. Newer SKUs and premium services (including some AI workloads) may also be temporarily unavailable.
These issues aren’t permanent — but during constraint windows, strategic planning is essential to maintain uptime and ensure deployment success.
How to protect your Azure workloads now (Bechtle recommendations).
1. Preserve the capacity you already hold.
During shortage windows, avoid autoscaling settings that deallocate VMs when load reduces.
Deallocating a VM releases its hardware allocation — meaning that when you need it back, capacity may no longer be available.
Our advice: Temporarily disable any scale‑in rules that stop/deallocate compute.
2. Use On Demand Capacity Reservations for critical workloads.
Microsoft’s capacity reservation feature allows you to guarantee VM capacity in UK South by reserving compute in advance.
This is particularly important for:
- Migrations
- Production workloads
- Seasonal or predictable demand spikes
Yes, it’s a commitment — but it eliminates deployment failure risk.
3. Choose VM sizes that are more likely to succeed.
The newest, fastest SKUs run on the newest hardware — which is often the first to hit capacity limits.
Consider using widely available VM families such as D_v3 where appropriate.
This significantly improves your chance of a successful deployment in UK South.
4. Move away from legacy VM SKUs.
Older families (Av1, Dv1, DSv1, etc.) cannot run on modern hardware and fail more often during shortages.
Upgrading to current‑generation SKUs gives:
- Higher allocation success
- Better performance
- Often better long‑term pricing
5. Consider UK aligned alternative regions where permitted.
If governance allows, Microsoft recommends the following alternatives to UK South during constraint windows:
- Sweden Central
- Austria East
- Belgium Central
- Norway East
- Switzerland North
- UK West (same geography, sometimes more availability)
Bechtle can help evaluate the most suitable “adjacent” region that still meets data residency and compliance commitments.
6. Deploy across multiple Availability Zones.
Even inside a single region, capacity can vary by zone.
Using multiple AZs increases resilience and lowers the risk of zonal allocation failures.
7. Use Microsoft’s Allocation Success Recommender.
This Azure Portal tool predicts the likelihood of successful VM allocations in your chosen region (including UK South) over the next 7 days.
It provides:
- Recommended VM sizes
- Real‑time capacity indicators
- Deployment success forecasting
Quick troubleshooting checklist
If deployment fails:
- Retry immediately — capacity often frees up within hours.
- Try an alternative VM size, availability zone, or region.
- Monitor the Azure Status Page for any wider issues.
- Review Microsoft’s official allocation guidance.
How Bechtle can help you right now?
As one of the UK’s leading Azure partners, Bechtle can support your organisation with:
✔ UK South risk assessments
Identify workloads most likely to experience capacity issues.
✔ VM size strategy & SKU optimisation
Discover the fastest‑to‑deploy, most cost‑effective SKUs for your environment.
✔ Capacity reservation planning
We help forecast needs and secure guaranteed compute before it becomes constrained.
✔ Multi‑region and zone design
Architectures that maintain performance, compliance and resilience.
✔ Migration, scaling & DR support
Ensure business continuity even during regional constraints.
For any queries please reach out to your Bechtle Account manager, and for Bechtle Managed Service customers please reach out to your SDM.