Describe Azure cost management and service level agreements Flashcards
What’s the TCO calculator?
Helps you estimate the cost savings of operating your solution on Azure over time compared to operating in your on-premises datacenter.
How does the TCO calculator work?
Working with the TCO calculator involves three steps
Define your workloads
Adjust assumptions
View the report
What is included in the first step, Define your workloads?
First, you’ll enter the specifications on your on-premises infrastructure into the TCO Calculator, based on these four categories:
Servers - this category included operating systems, virtualization methods, CPU cores, and memory
Databases- This category includes database types, server hardware, and the Azure service you want to use, which includes the expected maximum concurrent user sign-ins.
Storage - This category includes storage types and capacity, which includes any backup or archive storage.
Networking - This category includes the amount of network bandwidth you currently consume in your on-premise environment.
What is part of step 2 adjust assumptions?
Next, you’ll specify whether your current on-premises licenses are enrolled for Software Assurance, which can save you money by reusing those licenses on Azure. You’ll specify whether you need to replicate your storage to another Azure region for greater redundancy. Then you can see the key operating cost assumptions across several different areas, which will vary among teams and organizations.
What is step 3 view the report entail?
Choose a timeframe between one and five years, the TCO calculator generates a report that’s based on the information you’ve entered.
What types of Azure subscriptions can I use?
Free trial - a free trial subscription provides you with 12 months of popular free services, a credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and more than 25 services that are always free.
Pay-as-you-go - A pay-as-you-go subscription lets you pay for what you use by attaching a credit or debit card to your account. Organizations can apply for volume discounts and prepaid invoicing.
Member offers - Your existing membership to certain Microsoft products and services might provide you with credits for your Azure account, and reduced rates on Azure services. For example, member offers are available to Visual studio subscribers, Microsoft Partner Network members, Microsoft for startups members, and Microsoft Imaging members.
How do I purchase Azure services?
Through an enterprise agreement
Directly from the web
Through a Cloud Solution Provider
What factors affect cost?
Resource type - a number of factors influence the cost of Azure resources. They depend on the type of resource or how you customize it.
Usage meters- When you provision a resource, Azure creates meters to track that resource’s usage. Azure uses these meters to generate a usage a record that’s later used to help calculate your bill.
Resource usage - In azure, you’re always charged based on what you use. As an example, let’s look at how this billing applies to deallocating a VM.
Azure Subscription types - Some azure subscriptions types also include usage allowances, which affect costs.
Azure Marketplace - You can also purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors through Azure Marketplace.
Does location or network traffic affect cost?
Azure infrastructure is distributed globally, which lets you deploy your services centrally or provision your services closest to where your customers use them.
Different regions have different associated prices. Because geographic regions can affect where your network traffic flows, network traffic is a cost influence to consider as well.
How can you use Azure Advisor to minimize costs?
Azure Advisor identifies unused or underutilized resources and recommends unused resources that you can remove. This information helps you configure your resources to match your actual workload.
How can you use spending limits to restrict your spending?
If you have a free trial or credit based Azure subscription you can use spending limits to prevent accidental overrun.
How can you use Azure reservations to prepay?
Azure reservations offers discounted prices on certain Azure services. You can also prepay for one year or three years of use of VMs, database compute capacity, database throughput, and other Azure resources.
What are service level agreements?
Is a formal agreement between a service company and the customer. For Azure this agreement defines the performance standards that Microsoft commits for you, the customer.
Why are SLAs important?
Understanding the SLA for each Azure service you use helps you understand what guarantees you can expect.
What’s in a typical SLA?
Introduction
General terms
SLA details
