Cost Management and Service Level Agreements

Question 1

List the factors that can increase costs

Answer 1

Resource Types - All azure services (resources) have resource-specific pricing models.

Services - Azure specific offers (Enterprise, Web Direct, CSP, etc.) have different cost and billing components like prepaids, billing cycles, discounts, etc.

Location - running Azure service vary between Azure regions

Bandwidth - network traffic when uploading data to Azure or downloading from Azure

Question 2

List the factors that can reduce costs

Answer 2

Reserved instances - Azure Virtual Machines

Reserved capacity - Azure Storage, SQL Database vCores, Databricks DBUs, Cosmos DB RUs

Software plans - Red Hat, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Linux, etc.

Reservations are made for 1 or 3 years

Question 3

Describe the “pricing calculator”

Answer 3

The pricing calculator estimates the cost of Azure services by selecting services, adjusting their parameters (usage), and viewing the price.

Question 4

Describe the “Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator”

Answer 4

The TCO estimates and compares the cost of running workloads in a physical datacenter versus Azure. To use this, define your workloads, adjust assumptions, and view the generated report.

Question 5

Describe the functionality and usage of “Azure Cost Management”

Answer 5

Azure Cost Management is a centralized service for reporting usage and billing of Azure environment.

It includes a self-service cost exploration capability, budgets & alerts, cost recommendations, and automated exports.

Question 6

List the steps to minimizing costs in Azure

Answer 6

1. Azure Pricing Calculator to choose the low-cost region.
2. Hybrid use benefit and Azure Reservations
3. Azure Cost Management monitoring, budgets, alerts, and recommendations.
4. Understand service lifecycle and automate environments.
5. Use auto-scaling features to your advantage.
6. Azure Monitor to find and scale down underutilized resources.
7. Use tags & policies for effective governance.

Question 7

Describe the purpose of an “Azure Service Level Agreement (SLA)”

Answer 7

The SLA is a formal agreement between a service provider and a customer. SLA is a promise of a service’s availability which is a measure of time that a service remains operational.

Question 8

Describe the “service lifecycle in Azure”

Answer 8

Every service in Azure follows its own service lifecycle
Public preview is a ‘beta’ stage of the service available to general public use
Features can also be in preview stages
Designed for testing, not production solutions
General availability is a ‘production’ release of a service