Microsoft Azure, earlier known as Windows Azure, is a public cloud computing platform offered by Microsoft Corporation. It consists of a variety of cloud-based services, such as computing, analyzing, storing and networking. Microsoft users can select the cloud services they require in order to develop new applications or run present applications in the public cloud platforms. Although Azure cloud services are extremely helpful, enterprises need to keep in mind to cut down on the service expenses by utilizing Azure cost management strategies.
Microsoft Azure is designed to help businesses solve challenges and meet organizational goals. This open-source platform includes tools that are required by numerous industries, such as e-commerce, finance, etc. The Azure platform offers incredible flexible tools and technologies to users. Apart from this, Azure provides four different types of cloud computing, namely IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and server-less.
What is Azure Cost Management?
Microsoft Azure’s cost management tool is an excellent way for businesses running their Virtual Machines (VMs) on the Azure platform. Managing its cost is often among the top priorities set by enterprises that use public cloud computing technology.
What is Azure Cost Management
Azure cost management software provides business enterprises with a comprehensive view of every Azure account, types of virtual machines and their pricing. This helps businesses to make smarter and more practical decisions about how to decrease the cost of using Azure by rightsizing unneeded resources and scheduling on/off times for VMs that are less frequently used.
Apart from being a cost-controlling tool, businesses can also use it to generate new permission tiers, track resource use for each tier and collect data that help improve accountability and governance. Overall, the various features of the cost management tool also help businesses to lower the cloud platform service expenses and manage their Azure bills in a better way. It is an excellent way for system administrators to plan and forecast capacity for meeting Azure budget demands.
How Azure Cost Management tool helps?
Check out some of the significant ways that Azure cost management tool helps businesses to cut cost on their public cloud service use:
1 – Microsoft EA (Enterprise Agreement)
Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, known as EA for short, is an ideal option for large-sized businesses. Azure EA provides software licenses, the standard versions of Microsoft products and software support to help decrease Azure costs for businesses with over 500 users.
2 – Azure RI (Reserved Instance)
Microsoft Azure’s Reserved Instance (RI) pricing is also advantageous to cut costs on public cloud service usage. This feature allows business enterprises to get discounts by committing to resource level with a 1 or 3-year term. This is an excellent option for businesses that have a predictable, long-term production load.
Azure RI (Reserved Instance)
3 – Azure Low Priority Virtual Machines
You can also cut down the cost of Azure On-Demand services through its low priority VMs, which are popularly known as Azure spot instances. These computing instances are assigned from spare storage capacity and are offered at a discounted rate of between 60 – 80 % as compared to Azure On-Demand. The low priority VMs are ideal for fault-tolerant applications, such as rendering, batch-wise processing, testing, containerized applications, etc.
Azure Batch and VM scale sets include low priority VMs. Azure Batch performs jobs across several computing pools, known as Batch Pools. As batch jobs are background tasks that require several VMs to run, these are considered to be perfect to work with low priority VMs.
4 – Azure Test/Dev Pricing
There are several discounts on resources for users who need to complete testing and developing tasks. Individual customers are allowed a credit for this tool while Enterprise Agreement users get Dev/Test at a lower rate.
5 – Switching off VMs when not in use
Very often, businesses end up paying charges for unwanted and over-provisioned services, such as letting VMs run when not in use on Azure. This is caused when the demand decreases and remains unidentified or a large number of unwanted, aged snapshots get accumulated in unattached storage volumes. It is not always easy to monitor and determine over-provisioned instances but ensuring to switch off VMs when not in use helps in excellent Azure cost management.
Bottom Line
Microsoft Azure is an excellent platform for large and small businesses looking for swift and effective cloud-computing services. With the above-given tips, it becomes incredibly inexpensive to use and maintain these excellent services.