Module 6ab - Plan and Manage Azure Costs - Mechanisms for Managing Costs

Question 1

What 6 things can you do to manage costs at a high level?

Answer 1

1. Use TCO Calculator for the full process
2. Use Pricing Calculator for the specific services and resource allocations
3. Understand how each service or resource is metered and billed
4. Provision ONLY what your solution needs
5. Research available cost-saving offers
6. Delete unused Resources (dur!!!)

Question 2

Why migrate On-Prem to PaaS vs IaaS?

Answer 2

It’s usually cheaper and more manageable to migrate to PaaS services vs reinventing all your workloads in IaaS.

Ex. running your own SQL Server on a VM requires you to maintain, update the OS on the VM, install updates to both VM and SQL Server, etc. Why incur all that cost when you can simply move your SQL Server instance to Azure SQL Server? WAY cheaper!

Question 3

Why choose low-cost locations and Regions?

Answer 3

Cost for Products/Services/Resources vary across different Regions.

Question 4

How can I use tags to better manage costs?

Answer 4

Use tags to organize your Resources for better understanding and analyzing costs and billing data, which makes it easy to identify GROUPS of Resources that generate the highest costs.

Question 5

What are Quotas?

As an example, how many Virtual Machines can be allocated per Region?

Answer 5

Limits on the number of similar resources you can provision within your subscription.

Ex. you can allocate 25k VMs per Region

Question 6

To keep costs down w.r.t. egress traffic for Resources metered by bandwidth utilization, what’s the best strategy?

Answer 6

Some resources are metered and billed by egress bandwidth consumed.

Provision connected Resources that are metered by bandwidth IN THE SAME REGION to reduce egress traffic between them

Question 7

Hint: Stupid SQL Server Pools will murder your budget!

How do Spending Limits help with cost?

Answer 7

You know this…sigh…

When you reach your monthly allotted amount (ex. Developers get $50 a month), all your services are removed from prod, decommissioned, etc. And your Subscription gets suspended until the following month’s reallotment.

Question 8

How can you save on Licensing Costs?

Answer 8

Choose cost-effective operating systems for OS-agnostic apps - When your apps don’t depend on the underlying OS (eg .NET Core apps) go with the cheapest options

Use Azure Hybrid Benefit to repurpose Licenses on Azure - Licenses covered under Software Assurance could be repurposed on VMs in Azure

Question 9

How do you use Azure Advisor, what does it indicate wrt cost, and what are your options for remediation?

Answer 9

Azure Advisor identifies unused or underutilized resources and recommends ones that can be removed.

It will also indicate annual savings if the recommendation is followed.

Some cases Azure Advisor can auto-remediate, others will require human intervention to fix

Question 10

How are Recommendations sorted in Azure Advisor?

Answer 10

Recommendations are sorted by Impact level. Those levels are:

• High
• Medium
• Low

Question 11

What are Azure Reservations? What’s the advantage?

Answer 11

Reservation is basically pay-in-advance instead of pay-as-you-go.

Advantage: Discounted prices on certain Azure Services, possibly saving up to 72% as compared to pay-as-you-go.

Question 12

What length of time yields the best savings for Azure Reservations?

Answer 12

Committing up to a 3-year term yields the most savings.

Question 13

Hint: 3 types of Customers

Who are Azure Reservations available to?

Answer 13

Available to:

• Customers with an Enterprise Agreement
• Cloud Solutions Providers
• Pay-as-you-go subscriptions

Question 14

Azure Reservations are Cap-Ex as they are…after all…RESERVED Resources (T/F)?

Answer 14

TRUE

Question 15

My favorite tool…Azure Cost Management and Billing!

What is it, high level?
What are some key features?

Answer 15

I use this a lot. It’s a breakdown of spend based on service. Features include:

• Reporting
• Data enrichment
• Budgets
• Alerting
• Recommendations

Question 16

What’s a great way to save on VM costs?

Answer 16

Resize or Shutdown underutilized VMs, or Deallocate VMs (preserves disk and data)

Examine VM up and down times. For VMs that are underutilized or idle, resize them or shut them down altogether.

OR

Use scheduling features to DEALLOCATE VMs during downtime. Best way to save costs on VMs!! (remember Deallocation will preserve the hard disk and data)

Question 17

Downsizing VMs by reducing them to the next size down will cut costs by 50% (T/F)?

Resizing also happens instantly, so no need to plan for downtime or traffic rerouting (T/F)?

Answer 17

True. VM costs are LINEAR, meaning that reducing by the next size LOWER cuts the cost BY 50%!!!

False. Treat it like an outage. Resizing VMs requires them to stop => resize => restart, and takes a few minutes to do so. So plan accordingly (as if an outage) and shift traffic to backups