You now can reserve a static public IP for your cloud service in Azure. Previously, if you stopped all your VMs in your cloud service your static IP would be released and you would be issued a new one the next time you started your VMs. That meant if you wanted your demos to work properly without a bunch of rework each time, you had to keep at least one VM running in each cloud service all the time.

And even better news, the 1^st five static IP addresses you reserve are FREE. Now I can turn off all of my VMs and sleep easy at night knowing that my addresses won’t change, breaking my SQL Server Failover Cluster demo. Also, I can be pretty sure that now I won’t exceed my $200 MSDN Azure credit, which is always a good thing.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn690120.aspx