3.1 - Describe cost management

What are the factors that can affect how much you’ll pay for Azure services?

• Resource type

• Consumption

• Maintenance

• Geography

• Subscription type

• Azure Marketplace

Azure offers a pay as you go pricing model but it also has other pricing plans with discounts for predictable workloads. They are:

Reservations (commit to specific resources for one- or three-year terms to reduce cost)

Savings Plan (commit to an hourly spend amount on eligible compute services for one or three years)

Spot Pricing (for workloads that can handle interruptions. Azure Spot VMs can help reduce cost further)

Maintenance of your cloud environment is important to keep costs down. For example, after deprovisioning a VM, what else should you do?

Deprovision other resources that were a part of the VM like storage and networking (They may not deprovision themselves with the VM and continue costing money while not being used.)

Geography of services and tasks can affect costs. Some regions cost more to than others to host services. Network traffic costs will increase with ____

greater distance travelled

What are billing zones?

Billing zones are geographic groupings of Azure regions used to determine the cost of data transfer from Azure (egress)

Data transfers into Azure (ingress) are often free depending on the service. Data transfers from Azure (egress) is priced based on what?

Billing Zones

Some Azure subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs. For example:

An Azure free trial subscription provides access to a number of Azure products that are free for 12 months. It also includes credit to spend within your first 30 days of sign-up. You'll get access to more than 25 products that are always free (based on resource and region availability).

Azure Marketplace lets you purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors. This could include a preconfigured web server, a virtual machine with specialized software already installed, or a managed backup solution. When you purchase products through Azure Marketplace, you may pay for not only the Azure services that you’re using, but also _____

the services or expertise of the third-party vendor. Billing structures are set by the vendor.

With the Azure pricing calculator, you can estimate the cost of any provisioned resources, including compute, storage, and associated network costs. A different calculator was used which has been retired was called the ____

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator

Someone could accidentally and unknowingly deploy an Azure resource and not find out until they get their next invoice. What tool can help avoid this situation?

The cost management tool

What does the cost management tool let you do?

Provides the ability to

-quickly check Azure resource costs,

-create alerts based on resource spend, and

-create budgets that can be used to automate management of resources.