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6.3. Azure Costs & Tools.md

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Azure Costs & Tools

  • There's always the challenge of balancing cost against performance.

Usage meters

  • 📝 Used to determine Azure costs for each billing period
  • When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates one or more meter instances for that resource.
    • They are charged based on usage
  • The meters track the resources' usage, and generate a usage record that is used to calculate your bill.
  • Each meter tracks a particular kind of usage.
  • The usage that a meter tracks correlates to a number of billable units.
    • Those units are charged to your account for each billing period.
  • E.g. when you deploy a single virtual machine:
    • Azure might have following meters tracking:
      • Compute Hours, IP Address Hours
      • Data Transfer In, Data Transfer Out
      • Standard Managed Disk, Standard Managed Disk Operations
      • Standard IO-Disk, Standard IO-Block Blob Read, Standard IO-Block Blob Write, Standard IO-Block Blob Delete
    • 📝❗If you de-allocate a VM you'll not pay for it. However, your persistent disks remain in your subscription that you pay for.
  • Meters and pricing vary per product
  • Often have different pricing tiers based on the size or capacity of the resource.

Billing

  • At the end of each monthly billing cycle:
    • the usage values are charged to your payment method
    • the meters are reset
  • Check the billing page in the Azure portal:
    • summary of your current usage
    • any invoices from past billing cycles

Factors affecting costs

Resource type

  • Costs are resource-specific
  • The usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on the resource type.
  • The rate per billable unit depends on the resource type you are using.

Services

  • Enterprise, Web Direct, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers
  • Azure usage rates and billing periods can differ between them.
  • Some subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs.
  • Different billing structure apply to products and services from third-party vendors are available in the Azure Marketplace

Location

Bandwidth

  • Bandwidth = data moving in and out of Azure datacenters.
  • 💡📝 Mostly inbound data (data to Azure) transfers are free.
    • Outbound data transfers (from Azure to outside) costs based on Billing Zones
      • Moving data between Azure regions counts as outbound data transfer.

Billing zone

  • A Zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes.
  • Each zone has different outbound data transfer prices.
  • Zones:
    • Zone 1: United States, US Government, Europe, Canada, UK, France, Switzerland
    • Zone 2: East Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, India, Korea
    • Zone 3: Brazil, South Africa, UAE
    • DE Zone 1: Germany.

Tools

Azure pricing calculator

  • Free web-based tool: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
  • Get estimate costs without deploying and running those services or without manually pricing out each service from the Azure service pricing pages.
    • 📝 Can save results in your Azure account, export as Excel or shared as an URL.
  • You select Azure services and modify properties and options of the services.
    • Outputs the costs per service and total cost for the full estimate
    • Modifiable properties:
      • Region: E.g. Southeast Asia, central Canada, western United States, northern Europe...
      • Tier: E.g. Free Tier, Basic Tier, etc.
      • Billing Options: Per type of customers and subscriptions for a chosen product.
      • Support Options: Included / paid support options.
      • Programs and Offers: Available price offerings according to your customer or subscription type.
      • Azure Dev/Test Pricing: Available if subscription is based on a Dev/Test offer.
  • On the pricing calculator page, you'll see several tabs:
    • Products. Lists all Azure services, 📝 allows you put together services for your estimate.
      • Customizable e.g. for VMs you select region, OS, size, running hours.
    • Example Scenarios. Common solutions to add all the components, e.g. VMs + load balancer.
    • Saved Estimates. Your previously saved estimates.
    • FAQ

Azure Advisor

  • Free service that provides recommendations on
    • 📝 high availability, security, performance, operational excellence, and cost.
  • Analyzes your deployed services and gives personalized recommendations.
  • Cost recommendation areas:
    • Reduce costs by eliminating unprovisioned Azure ExpressRoute circuits
      • Finds circuits that have been in the provider status of Not Provisioned for more than one month.
      • Recommends deleting the circuit.
    • Buy reserved instances to save money over pay-as-you-go
      • Analyzes your VM usage over the last 30 days,
      • Determines & shows if you could save money in the future by purchasing reserved instances.
      • Shows the regions and sizes where you potentially have the most savings
    • Right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines
      • Monitors your virtual machine usage for 14 days.
      • Identifies underutilized virtual machines, allows you to scale down/iin to reduce your costs.
      • E.g. VMS with average CPU utilization of <= 5% (adjustable up to 20%)
      • E.g. network usage <= 7 MB for +4 days.

Azure Cost Management

  • Free tool that for greater insights into costs.
  • You can set budgets, schedule reports, and analyze your cost areas.
    • 📝 Historical breakdowns of services
    • Tracking against budget that's set

Azure TCO calculator

  • Compares on-prem vs cloud costs.
    1. Describe your infrastructure: servers, databases, storages, networking
    2. Adjust assumptions: adjust values for e.g. VM costs, electricity costs, IT labor costs.
    3. Compare costs & see how much you can save
      • compare costs
      • save chart
  • Web-based tool: azure.microsoft.com/pricing/tco
  • TCO = Total Cost of Ownership