Describe Azure Cost Management and Service Level Agreements

Question 1

The ________ helps you estimate the cost savings of operating your solution on Azure over time, instead of in your on-premises datacenter.

Answer 1

TCO Calculator

Question 2

The term __________ is commonly used in finance involves identifying and understanding all costs related to operating a technology capability including software licenses and hardware. These costs include electricity, network maintenance, and IT labor.

Answer 2

total cost of ownership

Question 3

True or false: You need an Azure subscription to work with the TCO Calculator.

Answer 3

False. You don’t need an Azure subscription to work with the TCO Calculator.

Question 4

____________ can save you money by reusing those licenses on Azure.

Answer 4

Software Assurance

Question 5

__________ provides you with access to Azure resources, such as virtual machines (VMs), storage, and databases. The types of resources you use impact your monthly bill.

Answer 5

Azure subscription

Question 6

True or false: Azure offers both free and paid subscription options to fit your needs and requirements.

Answer 6

True

Question 7

Name the 3 types of Azure subscriptions.

Answer 7

• Free trial
• Pay-as-you-go
• Member offers

Question 8

The _________ subscription provides you with 12 months of popular services at no cost, a credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and more than 25 services that are always at no cost. Your Azure services are disabled when the trial ends or when your credit expires for paid products, unless you upgrade to a paid subscription.

Answer 8

Free trial

Question 9

A ___________ subscription subscription enables you to pay for what you use by attaching a credit or debit card to your account. Organizations can apply for volume discounts and prepaid invoicing.

Answer 9

pay-as-you-go

Question 10

Visual Studio subscribers, Microsoft Partner Network members, Microsoft for Startups members, and Microsoft Imagine members license holders provides you with credits for your Azure account and reduced rates on Azure services in what subscription type?

Answer 10

Member offers

Question 11

Name the three main ways to purchase services on Azure.

Answer 11

• Through an Enterprise Agreement
• Directly from the web
• Through a Cloud Solution Provider

Question 12

Larger customers, known as enterprise customers, can sign an _____________ with Microsoft. This agreement commits them to spending a predetermined amount on Azure services over a period of three years. The service fee is typically paid annually. These customers receive the best customized pricing based on the kinds and amounts of services you plan on using.

Answer 12

Enterprise Agreement

Question 13

Your company purchases Azure services directly from the Azure portal website and pay standard prices. You’re billed monthly, as a credit card payment or through an invoice. This purchasing method is known as ________.

Answer 13

Web Direct

Question 14

True or false: A Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is a Microsoft Partner who helps you build solutions on top of Azure. Your CSP bills you for your Azure usage at a price they determine. They also answer your support questions and escalate them to Microsoft, as needed.

Answer 14

True

Question 15

True or false: You can bring up, or provision, Azure resources only from the Azure portal. The Azure portal arranges products and services by category. You select the services that fit your needs. Your account is billed according to Azure’s “pay for what you use” model.

Answer 15

False. You can bring up, or provision, Azure resources from the Azure portal or from the command line. The Azure portal arranges products and services by category. You select the services that fit your needs. Your account is billed according to Azure’s “pay for what you use” model.

Question 16

Name the six primary factors that affect costs of Azure services.

Answer 16

• Resource type
• Services
• Location
• Bandwidth
• Reserved Instances
• Azure Hybrid Use Benefit

Question 17

When you provision a resource, Azure creates ___________ to track usage of that resource. Azure uses these meters to generate a usage record that’s later used to help calculate your bill.

Answer 17

meters

Question 18

One of the six primary factors affecting costs is __________ so the usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on this.

Answer 18

Resource type

Question 19

True or false: Costs are resource-specific so the usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on the resource type.

Answer 19

True

Question 20

One of the size primary factors affecting costs are ____________ as Azure usage rates and billing periods can differ between Enterprise, Web Direct, and CSP customers.

Answer 20

Services

Question 21

One of the size primary factors affecting costs ____________ refers to the fact that the Azure infrastructure is globally distributed, and usage costs could vary as a result due to varying products, services, and resources offered.

Answer 21

Location

Question 22

True or false: A general best practice is to deploy to the location with the highest cost because it will have the most bandwidth and best performing compute resources.

Answer 22

False. The recommendation is to deploy to the lowest cost location when possible.

Question 23

With regards to ____________, one of the 6 primary factors affecting costs, some inbound data transfers are free such as data going into Azure. For outbound data transfers, such as data going out of Azure datacenters, pricing is based on Zones.

Answer 23

bandwidth

Question 24

True or false: A general best practice is to try to keep all regions in a given billing zone to save on costs.

Answer 24

True

Question 25

With _________________, you commit to buying in one-year or three-year plans for multiple products. These can significantly reduce your resource costs up to 72% over pay-as-you-go prices.

Answer 25

Azure Reservations aka Reserved Instances

Question 26

For customers with Software Assurance, ___________ allows you to use your on-premise licenses on Azure at a reduced cost.

Answer 26

Azure Hybrid Benefit

Question 27

True or false: Using reserved instances is a commitment to prepay.

Answer 27

True

Question 28

True or false: In Azure, you’re always charged based on what you use.

Answer 28

True

Question 29

True or false: Deallocating a VM means that the VM is no longer running, which also removes associated hard disks and data from your subscription.

Answer 29

False. Deallocating a VM means that the VM is no longer running. But the associated hard disks and data are still kept in Azure. The VM isn’t assigned to a CPU or network in Azure’s datacenter, so it doesn’t generate the costs associated with compute time or the VM’s IP address. Because the disks and data are still stored, and the resource is present in your Azure subscription, you’re still billed for disk storage.

Question 30

True or false: If you deallocate a VM it isn’t assigned to a CPU or network in Azure’s datacenter, so it doesn’t generate the costs associated with compute time or the VM’s IP address. Because the disks and data are still stored, and the resource is present in your Azure subscription, you’re still billed for disk storage.

Answer 30

True

Question 31

True or false: A good strategy to reduce costs is to deallocate a VM you use for testing purposes on weekends when your testing team isn’t using them.

Answer 31

True

Question 32

True or false: You can also purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors through Azure Marketplace. Examples include managed network firewall appliances or connectors to third-party backup services. Billing structures are set by the vendor.

Answer 32

True

Question 33

When you provision a resource in Azure, you need to define the ____________ of where it will be deployed.

Answer 33

location (known as the Azure region)

Question 34

A __________ is a geographical grouping of Azure regions for billing purposes.

Answer 34

zone

Question 35

The ____________ is a tool that helps you estimate the cost of Azure products. The options that you can configure vary between products, but include:

• Region
• Tier
• Billing Options
• Support Options
• Azure dev/test

Answer 35

Pricing Calculator

Question 36

True or false: The Pricing Calculator will provide you the exact costs you should expect to be billed.

Answer 36

False. It’s an estimate and not an invoice, so actual costs could differ.

Question 37

In what product would you access pricing details, product details, and documentation for each product?

Answer 37

Pricing calculator.

Question 38

Which of the following is not an options that you can configure in the Pricing calculator?

• Region
• Tier
• Competitor pricing such as AWS
• Billing options

Answer 38

Competitor pricing

Question 39

True or false: Azure doesn’t differentiate pricing for development or test workloads.

Answer 39

False. This pricing calculator lists the available prices for development and test workloads. Dev/Test pricing applies when you run resources within an Azure subscription that’s based on a Dev/Test offer.

Question 40

Which of the following is not a recommended practices that can help you minimize your costs?

• Understand estimated costs before you deploy
• Use Azure Advisor to monitor your usage
• Use spending limits to restrict your spending
• Avoid the use Azure Reservations

Answer 40

Avoid the use Azure Reservations.

Use Azure Reservations to prepay

Azure Reservations offers discounted prices on certain Azure services. Azure Reservations can save you up to 72 percent as compared to pay-as-you-go prices. To receive a discount, you reserve services and resources by paying in advance.

Question 41

True or false: If you have a free trial or a credit-based Azure subscription, you can use spending limits to prevent accidental overrun.

Answer 41

True

Question 42

True or false: As a best practice to help you manage costs, you should understand estimated costs before you deploy by carefully consider the products, services, and resources you need. Calculate your projected costs by using the Pricing calculator and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator. Only add the products, services, and resources that you need for your solution.

Answer 42

True

Question 43

_____________ identifies unused or underutilized resources and recommends unused resources that you can remove.

Answer 43

Azure Advisor

Question 44

True or false: You don’t need to worry about outgoing (egress) network bandwidth when provisioning services as provisioning to different regions is a best practices for resiliency.

Answer 44

False. Some resources are metered and billed according to how much outgoing (egress) network bandwidth they consume. You should provision connected resources that are metered by bandwidth in the same Azure region to reduce egress traffic between them.

Question 45

______________ is a free service that helps you understand your Azure bill, manage your account and subscriptions, monitor and control Azure spending, and optimize resource use.

Answer 45

Azure Cost Management

Question 46

A best practice is to apply _________ to identify cost owners as these can help you manage costs associated with the different groups of Azure products and resources. You can apply these to groups of Azure resources to organize billing data.

Answer 46

tags

Question 47

What would you use if you run several VMs for different teams and to categorize costs by department, such as Human Resources, Marketing, or Finance, or by environment, such as Test or Production?

Answer 47

tags

Question 48

True or false: A common recommendation that you’ll find from Azure Cost Management + Billing and Azure Advisor is to resize or shut down VMs that are underutilized or idle. As an example, say you have a VM whose size is Standard_D4_v4, a general-purpose VM type with four vCPUs and 16 GB of memory. You might discover that this VM is idle 90 percent of the time. Virtual machine costs are nonlinear so if you reduce the VM’s size from Standard_D4_v4 to Standard_D2_v4, which is the next size lower, your compute cost will lower by no more than 20 percent.

Answer 48

False. Virtual machine costs are linear and double for each size larger in the same series. So in this case, if you reduce the VM’s size from Standard_D4_v4 to Standard_D2_v4, which is the next size lower, you reduce your compute cost by 50 percent.

Question 49

True or false: Resizing a VM requires it to be stopped, resized, and then restarted.

Answer 49

True. Keep in mind that resizing a VM requires it to be stopped, resized, and then restarted. This process might take a few minutes depending on how significant the size change is. Be sure to properly plan for an outage, or shift your traffic to another instance while you perform resize operations.

Question 50

True or false: With regards to cost, you don’t need to worry because if you aren’t using a resource, Azure will automatically shut it down. Therefore, you don’t need to worry about nonproduction or proof-of-concept systems that are no longer needed following the completion of a project.

Answer 50

False. This recommendation might sound obvious, but if you aren’t using a resource, you should shut it down. It’s not uncommon to find nonproduction or proof-of-concept systems that are no longer needed following the completion of a project.

Regularly review your environment, and work to identify these systems. Shutting down these systems can have a dual benefit by saving you on infrastructure costs and potential savings on licensing and operating costs.

Question 51

True or false: Over time, one way to reduce costs is to gradually move IaaS workloads to run on platform as a service (PaaS) services. While you can think of IaaS as direct access to compute infrastructure, PaaS provides ready-made development and deployment environments that are managed for you.

Answer 51

True

Question 52

True or false: Not only are PaaS services such as Azure SQL Database often less expensive to run, but because they’re managed for you, you don’t need to worry about software updates, security patches, or optimizing physical storage for read and write operations.

Answer 52

True

Question 53

Name 2 ways you can Save on licensing costs.

Answer 53

* Choose cost-effective operating systems

Many Azure services provide a choice of running on Windows or Linux. In some cases, the cost depends on which you choose. When you have a choice, and your application doesn’t depend on the underlying operating system, it’s useful to compare pricing to see whether you can save money.

• Use Azure Hybrid Benefit to repurpose software licenses on Azure

If you’ve purchased licenses for Windows Server or SQL Server, and your licenses are covered by Software Assurance, you might be able to repurpose those licenses on VMs on Azure.

Question 54

True or false: If you’ve purchased licenses for Windows Server or SQL Server, and your licenses are covered by Software Assurance, you might be able to repurpose those licenses on VMs on Azure.

Answer 54

True

Question 55

Describe how you can minimize costs.

Answer 55

• Perform cost analysis before you deploy.
• Use Azure Advisor to monitor your usage.
• Use spending limits to prevent accidental spending.
• Use Azure Reservations to prepay.
• Choose low-cost locations and regions.
• Research available cost-saving offers.
• Apply tags to identify cost owners.

Question 56

Refer to the attached. Which is the best first step the team should take to compare the cost of running these environments on Azure versus in their datacenter?

• They’re just test environments. Spin them up and check the bill at the end of the month.
• Assume that running in the cloud costs about the same as running in the datacenter.
• Run the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator.

Answer 56

Run the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator.
Running the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator is a great first step because it can provide an accurate comparison of running workloads in the datacenter versus on Azure, certified by an independent research company.

Question 57

Refer to the attached. What’s the best way to ensure that the development team doesn’t provision too many virtual machines at the same time?

• Do nothing. Let the development team use what they need.
• Apply spending limits to the development team’s Azure subscription.
• Verbally give the development lead a budget and hold them accountable for overages.

Answer 57

Apply spending limits to the development team’s Azure subscription.

If you exceed your spending limit, active resources are deallocated. You can then decide whether to increase your limit or provision fewer resources.

Question 58

Refer to the attached. Which is the most efficient way for the testing team to save costs on virtual machines on weekends, when testers are not at work?

• Delete the virtual machines before the weekend and create a new set the following week.
• Deallocate virtual machines when they’re not in use.
• Just let everything run. Azure bills you only for the CPU time that you use.

Answer 58

Deallocate virtual machines when they’re not in use.

When you deallocate virtual machines, the associated hard disks and data are still kept in Azure. But you don’t pay for CPU or network consumption, which can help save costs.

Question 59

Refer to the attached. Resources in the Dev and Test environments are each paid for by different departments. What’s the best way to categorize costs by department?

• Apply a tag to each virtual machine that identifies the appropriate billing department.
• Split the cost evenly between departments.
• Keep a spreadsheet that lists each team’s resources.

Answer 59

Apply a tag to each virtual machine that identifies the appropriate billing department.

You can apply tags to groups of Azure resources to organize billing data.

Question 60

A ____________ is a formal agreement between a service company and the customer. For Azure, this agreement defines the performance standards that Microsoft commits to for you, the customer.

Answer 60

service-level agreement (SLA)

Question 61

True or false: Service Level Agreements describe Microsoft’s commitments for uptime and connectivity.

Answer 61

True

Question 62

True or false: SLAs provided by Microsoft are applied at the top layer of a service and will not specify commitments on individual products.

Answer 62

False. SLAs provided by Microsoft are based on services and individual products.

Question 63

True or false: You can commit to your business and customers for stability and availability when using Azure free and preview features/services.

Answer 63

False. Free and preview features/services do not offer SLAs.

Question 64

True or false: You don’t need an Azure subscription to review service SLAs.

Answer 64

True

Question 65

Many decisions can raise or lower your SLA. Describe what can lower your SLA.

Answer 65

• Adding more services as this creates a “product of 2 or more” SLAs called a composite SLA
• Choosing free or non-SLA services

Question 66

Many decisions can raise or lower your SLA. Describe what can improve your SLA.

Answer 66

• Use of Availability Zones
• Use of Redundant Systems

Question 67

Name the 3 sections typical to a SLA.

Answer 67

• Introduction
• General Terms
• SLA Details

Question 68

In what section of the SLA document would you find the terms that define what’s meant by downtime, incidents, and error codes?

Answer 68

General terms

Question 69

True or false: The Introduction section of an SLA document provides the general terms of the agreement, including how to submit a claim, receive credit for any performance or availability issues, and limitations of the agreement.

Answer 69

False: Those are contained in the General Terms section.

Question 70

The primary performance commitment typically focuses on ___________, or the percentage of time that a product or service is successfully operational.

Answer 70

uptime

Question 71

Some SLAs focus on other factors, including ____________, or how fast the service must respond to a request.

Answer 71

latency

Question 72

____________ refers to the time duration that the service is unavailable.

Answer 72

Downtime

Question 73

True or false: A monthly SLA is not cumulative, which means that the duration of multiple different service outages in a month would be independent and not combined.

Answer 73

False. These amounts are cumulative, which means that the duration of multiple different service outages would be combined, or added together.

Question 74

A ____________ is the percentage of the fees you paid that are credited back to you according to the claim approval process.

Answer 74

service credit

Question 75

True or false: An SLA describes how Microsoft responds when an Azure service fails to perform to its specification.

Answer 75

True

Question 76

True or false: Credits typically increase as uptime decreases.

Answer 76

True. Here’s how credits are applied for Azure Database for MySQL according to uptime:

Monthly uptime percentage / Service credit percentage

< 99.99 / 10

< 99 / 25

< 95 / 100

Question 77

___________ provides a global view of the health of Azure services and regions. If you suspect there’s an outage, this is often a good place to start your investigation.

Answer 77

Azure status

Question 78

____________ provides a personalized view of the health of the Azure services and regions that you’re using, directly from the Azure portal.

Answer 78

Azure Service Health

Question 79

True or false: Typically, you need to file a claim with Microsoft to receive a service credit. If you purchase Azure services from a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, your CSP typically manages the claims process.

Answer 79

True

Question 80

True or false: Each SLA specifies the timeline by which you must submit your claim and when Microsoft processes your claim. For many services, you must submit your claim by the end of the calendar month following the month in which the incident occurred.

Answer 80

True

Question 81

True or false: An application SLA defines the SLA requirements for a specific application typically refering to an application that you build on Azure.

Answer 81

True

Question 82

Name 3 considerations when you define your application SLA.

Answer 82

• Business impact

If the Special Orders application goes down, what would the business impact be? In this case, customers can’t place new orders through the store and staff can’t check the status of existing orders. Customers will either need to try again later or possibly go to a competitor.

• Effect on other business operations

The Special Orders application doesn’t affect other operations. So the majority of the Tailwind Traders business will continue to function normally if the Special Orders application went down.

• Usage patterns
• Usage patterns* define when and how users access your application.

One question to consider is whether the availability requirement differs between critical and non-critical time periods. For example, a tax-filing application can’t fail during a filing deadline.

Question 83

____________ define when and how users access your application.

Answer 83

Usage patterns

Question 84

A ____________ is a distinct capability or task that’s logically separated from other tasks, in terms of business logic and data storage requirements. Each defines a set of requirements for availability, scalability, data consistency, and disaster recovery.

Answer 84

workload

Question 85

True or false: Computing the composite SLA requires that you multiply the SLA of each individual service.

Answer 85

True.

Question 86

Refer to the attached to compute the application SLA for an application that is deployed with:

• Two virtual machines.
• One instance of Azure SQL Database.
• One instance of Azure Load Balancer.

Answer 86

The composite SLA would be:

99. 9%×99.9%×99.99%×99.99%=
100. 999×0.999×0.9999×0.9999=
101. 9978=99.78%

Recall that you need two virtual machines. Therefore, you include the Virtual Machines SLA of 99.9 percent two times in the formula.

Note that even though all of the individual services have SLAs equal to or better than the application SLA, combining them results in an overall number that’s lower than the 99.9 percent you need. Why? Because using multiple services adds an extra level of complexity and slightly increases the risk of failure.

Question 87

What strategies should you consider when the composite SLA doesn’t meet your needs?

Answer 87

* Choose customization options that fit your required SLA

• Build availability requirements into your design (for example: you can deploy one or more extra instances of the same virtual machine across the different availability zones in the same Azure region.)
• Include redundancy to increase availability

Question 88

An ____________ is a unique physical location within an Azure region. Each is made up of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. These use different schedules for maintenance, so if one is affected, your virtual machine instance in the other is unaffected.

Answer 88

availability zone

Question 89

True or false: Deploying two or more instances of an Azure virtual machine across two or more availability zones raises the virtual machine SLA to 99.99 percent.

Answer 89

True

Question 90

Refer to the attached to compute the application SLA for an application that is deployed with:

• Two virtual machines.
• One instance of Azure SQL Database.
• One instance of Azure Load Balancer.

But this provides only a 99.78% application SLA when you need 99.9% or better. What could you do to get it above 99.9%

Answer 90

Deploying two or more instances of an Azure virtual machine across two or more availability zones raises the virtual machine SLA to 99.99 percent. Recalculating your composite SLA above with this Virtual Machines SLA gives you an application SLA of:

99.99%×99.99%×99.99%×99.99%

=99.96%

Question 91

To ensure high availability, you might plan for your application to have duplicate components across several regions, known as __________.

Answer 91

redundancy

Question 92

True or false: To achieve maximum availability in your application, add redundancy to every single part of the application. This redundancy includes the application itself, as well as the underlying services and infrastructure.

Answer 92

True

Question 93

The __________ defines how every Azure service is released for public use.

Answer 93

service lifecycle

Question 94

The service lifecycle defines how every Azure service is released for public use. Name the 3 phases.

Answer 94

Every Azure service starts in the development phase. In this phase, the Azure team collects and defines its requirements, and begins to build the service.

Next, the service is released to the public preview phase. During this phase, the public can access and experiment with it and provide real-world feedback. Your feedback helps Microsoft improve services. More importantly, providing feedback gives you the opportunity to request new or different capabilities so that services better meet your needs.

After a new Azure service has been validated and tested, it’s released to all customers as a production-ready service. This is known as general availability (GA).

Question 95

In what phase of a service lifecycle is the service first made available to the public?

Answer 95

Next, the service is released to the public preview phase. During this phase, the public can access and experiment with it and provide real-world feedback. Your feedback helps Microsoft improve services. More importantly, providing feedback gives you the opportunity to request new or different capabilities so that services better meet your needs.

Question 96

At what phase in the service lifecycle is it considered production ready with SLAs provided?

Answer 96

After a new Azure service has been validated and tested, it’s released to all customers as a production-ready service. This is known as general availability (GA).

Question 97

True or false: Previews are great for business-critical workloads giving you the opportunity to offer new features ahead of your competitors.

Answer 97

Flase. Some previews may not be covered by customer support, and may be subject to reduced or different security, compliance, and privacy commitments. For these reasons, previews are not recommended for business-critical workloads.

Question 98

How can you access preview services?

Answer 98

You can access preview services from the Azure portal.

Question 99

How can you stay updated on the latest announcements?

Answer 99

The Azure updates page provides information about the latest updates to Azure products, services, and features, and product roadmaps and announcements.

Question 100

Refer to the attached, What’s the SLA for Azure Maps in terms of guaranteed uptime?

99 percent

99. 9 percent
100. 99 percent

Answer 100

99.9 percent

Question 101

Refer to the attached, What’s the new composite SLA? Remember, the new SLA includes a third virtual machine and Azure Maps.

• 99.58 percent
• 99.78 percent
• 99.99 percent

Answer 101

99.58 percent

Question 102

Refer to the attached, Adding a third virtual machine reduces the composite SLA. How can Tailwind Traders offset this reduction?

• Increase the size of each virtual machine.
• Deploy extra instances of the same virtual machines across the different availability zones in the same Azure region.
• Do nothing. Using Azure Load Balancer increases the SLA for virtual machines.

Answer 102

Deploy extra instances of the same virtual machines across the different availability zones in the same Azure region.

If one availability zone is affected, your virtual machine instance in the other availability zone should be unaffected.

Question 103

Refer to the attached, What approach might the company take in adding the augmented reality (AR) preview service to its architecture?

• The Special Orders app is already in production. The company shouldn’t look into the AR service until the service reaches general availability (GA).
• The Special Orders app is mainly for use by retail employees. The company can integrate the AR service now because potential downtime or failures aren’t an important factor.
• The development team can create a prototype version of the app that includes the AR service that it tests out with select retail employees.

Answer 103

The development team can create a prototype version of the app that includes the AR service that it tests out with select retail employees.