Pricing and Cost Management
Pricing Calculator - create cost estimates for using Azure
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - the all-in price of running a server that includes the cost of the hardware, software, human labor for installation and maintenance, electricity, cooling, backups, real estate, internet connectivity, etc
- TCO Calculator https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/pricing/tco/calculator/
Azure Cost Management - a tool to analyze historical spending in the cloud
Tags - metadata can be added to Azure resources to organize related resources and help with billing and support issues
Best Practices for Reducing Costs in Azure
- Use Azure Advisor cost tab for recommendations
- Auto shutdown of Dev/QA resources
- Utilize storage lifecycle
- hot, cool, archive storage tiers
- Utilize reserved instances (1 or 3 year contract) if you’re likely to use a VM for that long
- Configure alerts when billing exceeds an expected level
- Use Azure Policy to prevent excessive spending like restricting VM SKUs
- Implement automatic scaling to reduce costs
- Downsize resources like managed storage accounts that are a lot bigger than you actually need
- Use tags to more easily identify named owners/projects of running resources in Azure