AZ-900 Flash Cards Part 14: Cost Factors, Reduction Methods, & Management

Cost Factors, Cost Reduction Methods, Azure Cost Management

What are the four factors that affect Azure environment cost?

Resource Types, Services, Location, Bandwidth/Traffic

Cost Affecting Factors Characteristics

Base Cost:

Resource Types - All Azure services (resources) have resource-specific pricing models. Typically consisting of one or more metrics

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

Location - running Azure services vary between Azure regions

Bandwidth - network traffic when uploading (inbound/ingress) data to Azure or downloading (outbound/egress) from Azure

Reservation Types

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.

How long are Reservations made?

1 or 3 years

What are Reserved Instances?

Azure Virtual Machines

What is Reserved capacity?

Azure Storage, SQL Database vCores, Databricks DBUs, Cosmos DB RUs

What are examples of Software plans?

Red Hat, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Linux, etc.

What is Spot VM best for?

Spot VM is best for interruptible workloads

Ex: Batch processing, dev/test environments, large compute workloads, non-critical tasks

How do Spot VMs work?

• Significant discount for Azure VMs

• Capacity can be taken away at any time

• Customer can set maximum price after discount

Hybrid Benefit Summary (things you can lower price with Hybrid Benefit)

Use existing licenses in the Azure

Windows Server - Azure VM

RedHat - Azure VM

SUSE Linux - Azure VM

SQL Server (All Azure) - SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on VM, Data Factory SQL Server Integration Services

Azure Pricing Calculator

Estimate cost of Azure services

Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

Compare datacenter versus Azure workloads

Reservations (reserved instances, reserved capacity)

purchase Azure services for 1 or 3 years in advance with significant discounts

Spot pricing

Purchase unused Virtual Machine Capacity for significant discount

Hybrid use benefit

Use existing licenses in the cloud (like OS for Servers)

Azure Cost Management

Centralized service for reporting usage and billing of Azure environment

What are some services of Azure Cost Management?

Self-service cost exploration capabilities

Budgets & alerts

Cost recommendations

Automated exports (Like power BI)

Minimizing costs example

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 autoscaling features to your advantage

6. Azure monitor to find and scale down underutilized resources

7. Use tags & policies for effective governance

Are Azure TCO Calculator and Azure Pricing Calculator a part of Azure Cost Management?

No