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One of the main motives for companies moving to the cloud is the potential for significant cost savings. While savings in the cloud vs. on-prem is achievable, it is also easy to end up spending more than anticipated due to cloud sprawl, undefined governance, and general unexpected/unbudgeted usage of Azure resources. The good news is that with some basic analysis and proper planning, you can regain control of Azure cloud costs and achieve true cost optimization. In this blog, we will highlight five ways to help decrease Azure costs and get you on track toward total optimization: 1. Reserved Virtual Machine Instances While RI’s are a great way to save costs on Virtual Machines potentially, you should first understand savings vs. risk to make proper decisions. If you don’t consider historical/forecasted runtime and resource utilization, it is going to be hard to evaluate if and which type of Reserved Instances are the best fit. Consider the following example using 1-year Reserved VM Instance on a D4 v3 VM size. Assuming the D4v3 size provides proper compute resources for now and 12 months in the future, the breakeven point (risk) and projected savings vary based on the expected runtime of the VM.
As you can see, RI’s would not make sense if you are only running 50% of the month, but definitely would at 75% or 100% runtime. While VM’s vary in breakeven points, a good rule of thumb is that if a VM is running 60%+ of the hours each month, it’s a good candidate for cost savings via Reserved Instances.
Anyone who owns Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance are eligible to run Azure VM’s at Linux-based pricing. As a result, you only pay for the hourly rate for compute of the virtual machine, eliminating the hourly cost of the OS/SQL Server license. Even for customers who don’t currently have eligible licenses, the cost savings of AHB can still be achieved by purchasing new licenses with software assurance or in a 1-year or 3-year subscription model. The long-term cost savings is significant in most cases. But, just like Reserved VM Instances, various factors determine the actual savings. Make sure to understand the current inventory of VM’s and licenses if you are looking to take advantage of Reserved VM Instances and/or Hybrid Benefits.
Make sure to check out the other Azure Spring Clean
articles! Which Azure service provides recommendations on how you can optimize and improve the efficiency of your workloads by identifying idle and underutilized resources?Azure Advisor helps you optimize and reduce your overall Azure spend by identifying idle and underutilized resources. You can get cost recommendations from the Cost tab on the Advisor dashboard.
What methods can you use to reduce Azure costs?7 ways to optimize costs today. Shut down unused resources. ... . Right-size underused resources. ... . Reserve instances for consistent workloads. ... . Take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit. ... . Configure autoscaling. ... . Set up budgets and allocate costs to teams and projects. ... . Choose the right Azure compute service.. Which Azure tool has a set of tools for monitoring allocating and optimization Azure cost?nOps Azure Cost Optimization
nOps is a leading cloud platform management provider with excellent Azure capabilities. Azure users can use nOps for various cost management operations, from tracking costs to detecting anomalies. All cost management capabilities are under one Cloud Cost-Control Dashboard.
What tools are available for virtual machine pricing in Azure?Analytics. Limitless analytics service with unmatched time to insight.. Design AI with Apache Spark™-based analytics.. A unified data governance solution that maximizes the business value of your data.. Data Factory. ... . Provision cloud Hadoop, Spark, R Server, HBase, and Storm clusters.. Azure Stream Analytics.. |