Managing Azure Costs Flashcards
Factors affecting costs - Different services are billed on different factors. Billing types?
Free services, Pay per usage, Pay for time (per second), Pay for bandwidth
Free services
You have limits in terms of subscription, region, …
Examples of free services:
- Resource groups
- Virtual network (up to 50)
- Load balancer (basic)
- Azure Active Directory (basic)
- Network security groups
- Free-tier web apps (up to 10)
Pay per usage
Tracking time, CPU utilization, number of executions, …
Opportunity for saving costs with Azure Functions:
- 1 million executions free per month;
- 0,20$ per million executions
- Cheapest virtual machine for 20$ a month;
Examples of pay per usage services:
- Functions
- Logic Apps
- Storage (pay per GB)
- Outbound bandwidth
- Cognitive Services API
Pay for time (per second)
Billing stops when the VM is stopped
Stability in pricing:
- Pay a fixed price per month for computing power or storage capacity
- Whether you use it or not
- Discounts for 1 year or 3 year commitment in VM
Pay for bandwidth
First 5 GB are free; inbound data is free; 1PB of data transfer =52,000$
Best practices for reducing costs in Azure
- Azure Advisor cost tab
- Auto shutdown
- Utilize cool/archive storage where possible
- Reserved instances
- Configure billing alerts when it exceeds an expected level;
- Restrict access to certain expensive resources using Policy;
- Auto scaling resources
- Downsizing when resources are over-provisioned
- Ensure every resource has an owner tag;
- Spot Pricing
- Azure Advisor cost tab
- Auto shutdown
- Utilize cool/archive storage where possible
- Reserved instances
- Azure Advisor cost tab: Gives you recommendations based on your actual usage of Azure. If you have things/space not being used it show up in Advisor.
- Auto shutdown: If some resources have the auto shutdown option use it.
- Utilize cool/archive storage where possible (files that are rarely to never used you can move them to an archive tier (like backup files, or history data);
- Reserved instances: if the project will be long its cheaper to reserve instances then;
- Configure billing alerts when it exceeds an expected level;
- Restrict access to certain expensive resources using Policy;
- Auto scaling resources
- Configure billing alerts when it exceeds an expected level;
- Restrict access to certain expensive resources using Policy;
- Auto scaling resources (use less resource but scale up when the demand asks for it);
- Downsizing when resources are over-provisioned
- Ensure every resource has an owner tag;
- Spot Pricing
- Downsizing when resources are over-provisioned (check your usages and change them to smaller or different types when over-provisioned)
- Ensure every resource has an owner tag;
- Spot Pricing (ability to use VM when nobody is using it for a discount price – its good when you have things that can run any time with no specific date; when someone uses it you get kicked off)
Pricing calculator
Has a link to it on Azure web site. It’s not 100% accurate.
Configurable Options: Region, tier, subscription type, support options, dev/test pricing (different licenses).
When the cost is estimated you can export and share the estimate.
Total Cost of Ownership Calculator (TCO)
The cost of a server is more than just the cost of the hardware. Other costs: electricity, cooling, internet connectivity, rack space, maintenance labor, backup, setup labor.
In here you can build a calculator to check the cost running in Azure versus the cost of running a solution in your own environment.
Azure Cost Management
Free tool inside Azure to analyze spending over time. You can see what are you being charged day by day. Its basically a dashboard view with filters, …
You track your spending against your budgeted with the budget feature.
You can schedule reports and notifications.
