I used to be a technical seller for Azure. This situation is obviously not great for you as a customer but there are proactive steps you can take to prevent this going forward. Reach out to your sales team and work with them on your roadmap for compute requirements going forward. The sales team has a forecast tool that feeds back into the department that buys and racks the equipment. If you can provide enough lead time, they will make sure you have compute resources available in your subscriptions.
What you describe is like the inverse of 90% of the reason companies host in the cloud. What makes needing to forcast and reach out to a sales guy to eventually stock hardware for your needs (while now competing against other customers for those resources) any better than hosting on prem.
AWS for sure has had resource constraints in different AZs (especially during flack Friday and holiday loads) but I have never had an issue finding resources to spin up especially if I was willing to be flexible on vm type.
Under most circumstance, this isn't needed unless you have a big ask. Say, you need 1,000 specific cores and GPUs, then this process is the best way to ensure you have them available.
The original poster probably has the ability to spin up other instance types in their region. If there is no compute capacity in the entire region, something went wrong operationally.
I'm not suggesting you should put in a request for every new resource you need, but if you have a specific instance type or a large number needed, it helps. You're not losing the ability to shut them down the next day if you don't need them, you're just telling the Azure team that you expect to spin some up around a certain time. If you're making a significant request of compute capacity, the team has the ability to reserve those instances for your subscriptions so that you're not competing with others for those cores.
Why work with a human in the Azure sales department and plan cloud resources a year ahead? What’s the point of the cloud at this point? Then it just becomes a 100x more expensive version of hiring an infrastructure person and plan with them your own physical resources a year ahead.
