Tag: azure cost optimization

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

Posted on | by Steve Upkin | Leave a Comment on Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

Just like Amazon’s Web Services, Microsoft too has its platform called Azure. It’s a platform that offers a variety of cloud-based solutions to the enterprises of different sizes. The platform lets you make use of your favorite web building tools and management tools to take your business to the next level. If you are wondering about how you can reduce the overall cloud costing, then you must follow the list of Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices now!

Microsoft is everyone’s favorite firm as they offer all types of services for computer users and web developers. The company is now focusing more on providing cloud solutions by expanding the Azure platform with more partners. 

New technologies attract all types of enterprises and the Azure platform offers all types of cloud-based solutions to these firms. We all know that cloud is cost-effective than the physical software or services and for the very same reason, most firms are searching for reliable partners to help them improve their businesses. You can save even more on the same by following the Best Practices for Azure. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

  1. Keep an eye on the usages of Virtual Machines 

Virtual Machines are important to run a business. If you want to modernize your business, you must have to start using the different types of virtual machines which can help you and your business in many ways. 

Each Virtual Machine has its power of performing various tasks and provide limited storage space to save important data. When you opt for Azure’s Cloud Solutions, you can lessen up the use of such virtual machines. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Keep an eye on the usages of virtual machines

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Keep an eye on the usages of virtual machines

By reducing the size of the Virtual Machines, you can save direct money on their maintenance and purchase. Apart from this, with a limited number of resources, you can use the available virtual machines to their maximum capacity. 

  1. Get Significant Discounts with Instances 

We all use Azure Instances for different purposes. Did you know you can reserve Azure Instances to cut down the extra cost on their purchases? You can get impressive discounts on the reservation of Azure Instances. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Get significant discounts with instances

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Get significant discounts with instances

Currently, they have three different reservation plans to suit your requirements. If you go with the one-year reservation plan, you will get a 40-50% discount. The two-year reservation plan gets you up to 65% of the discount. The third unique plan is called spot pricing that lets you put up a bid for the pricing which can get you a discount of up to 90%. 

  1. Go Serverless 

Servers are indeed necessary for the businesses if you want to take make your business a complete web-based. What you can do here to go with the serverless medium. 

Azure has a special tool called Azure Functions. The Functions is a serverless solution to run the code for the applications and websites without having to be connected to the server. All it requires is the software code and that’s all. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Go serverless

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Go serverless

Serverless functions take each of the code from the software and run them as separate containers. The separate containers give more flexibility to the developers to monitor and scale up the applications. 

  1. Make use of Cold Storage 

Azure has a special storage feature called Azure Storage. The Azure Storage is highly used by the partner companies and new clients who want to have separate storage space for their new ventures. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Make use of cold storage

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Make use of cold storage

Interestingly, you will be provided with two different options- warm storage and cold storage to choose from. Since you are using the stored data in rare cases, you should go with the cold storage. Cold storage is there for rare usage of the data. On the other hand, warm storage is for regular data storing which costs you higher than the cold storage. 

  1. Seek help from the trusted cloud management platform 

To make the Azure Cost Optimization more effective to save you extra money, you must have to choose the reliable cloud management platform. The cloud management platform allows you to check the subscriptions of different services as well as storage platforms. 

By analyzing all the data, subscriptions, and services, the platform would suggest you cut down some unwanted services. The platform will give you some recommendations for the services that are must-have for the business. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Seek help from the trusted cloud management platform

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Seek help from the trusted cloud management platform

Always research well before you jump for a particular service to optimize the Azure Cloud Services. It is always a good idea to optimize the overall expenses for the services to support your business. 

The Bottom Line: 

Azure is a big hub with tons of services based on the cloud. No matter whether you run a small company or a big enterprise, you must have to utilize special technologies and platforms to transform your business digitally. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices give you clear ideas about how you can utilize the need for your project that can eventually help you and your company to save thousands of dollars. 

azure compute cloud cost optimization

azure cost optimization

Azure Cost Optimization Strategies for Cloud Cost Saving

Posted on | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment on Azure Cost Optimization Strategies for Cloud Cost Saving

Azure Cost Optimization

A cloud implementation can be a lot like New Year’s Resolutions. Everything’s great for a month or two and then things start to slip and by the time the next New Year rolls around, you’re wondering just what could have happened.

If that sounds like you, then the long-term solution is to develop a robust cloud strategy to bring your cloud costs under control. If, however, you need to bring down your cloud spending as quickly as humanly possible, here are some “quick fixes” that can also have benefits over the long term.

Delete unused disks

One key point you need to understand about Azure is that it does not automatically delete your disks when you delete a virtual machine. What’s more, it’s highly unlikely that it’s ever going to for the simple reason that Microsoft is highly unlikely ever to want to be held responsible for you losing data you wanted to keep. This means that the onus is on you to remember to do it yourself.

Deleting disks in Azure can be a bit of a pain, but it’s important to make a point of doing it. Realistically, you want to instill it into everyone that they must clean up their disks after each use and then, once a week or so, do a double-check and clean up anything anyone’s missed. If the same people are routinely failing to clean up after themselves, take it up with them and/or their manager.

Deal with idling resources

Sometimes you need to leave a virtual machine idling, but there is a potential solution to this. Most times, however, idling resources are, bluntly, a sign of bad Azure cost management or, in other words, just a waste of money.

Often the easiest way to deal with the issue of idling resources is to give every asset an owner who is responsible for managing the Azure billing and, ideally, handing over the money out of their own departmental budget. If nobody is willing to own a resource, then it gets turned off. If nobody screams, it isn’t needed. Ideally, you will want to back this up with support to help them with their Azure cost optimization because there is a good chance that the issue is going to boil down to rightsizing and that is a genuine challenge.

Size your resources appropriately

Correct resource-sizing really is the foundation of all Azure cost optimization and it is not as easy as it sounds. In fact, realistically, instead of spending human blood, sweat, toil and tears on the matter, it’s probably a very good idea just to invest in a cloud cost optimization tool to analyze your usage and make recommendations on sizing. This is likely to end up working out substantially more affordable (and less hassle) than the number of staff hours it would take to achieve the same result – assuming you could work it out by yourself.

Check out B machines

Over the long term, platform-as-a-service may come to be seen as standard, but for now, a lot of the time, virtual machines are the most practical way to go. The problem with virtual machines is that they are billed the whole time they are powered on, regardless of whether or not they are actively in use. In principle, the answer to this is to power off the virtual machines. In practice, however, there may be instances when a virtual machine has to be kept available at all times, even though it’s hardly ever going to be used and that can have a painful impact on your Azure billing. One potential solution is to use “B machines” or burstable machines, which are designed for this specific purpose and can offer significant cost savings over standard virtual machines.

Split out your databases

In simple terms, if you have a SQL database that needs a lot of computing power, then you’re probably just as well to move from a regular SQL server to Azure SQL. Even if you have a SQL database that uses minimal computing power but which has predictable usage patterns, it may be just as well to move from regular SQL to Azure SQL.

If, however, you have a collection of databases with “spiky” usage patterns, then you may find that regular Azure SQL gets very expensive very quickly because you have to resource for peak periods and leave the resource lying idle (but being charged) the rest of the time. If this sounds like you, then Azure SQL elastic pools could be just what you need.

Basically, as their name suggests, this allows you to buy a “pool” of resources that you can share amongst various databases. Ideally, you want all the databases in the pool to have similar usage patterns so they can all use the resources equitably. If you have databases with higher resource requirements, then it’s usually best either to split them off into their own pool or to set them up under regular Azure SQL.

See Also

AWS Fargate Price Reduction