Monday, March 21, 2016

Cost Optimization Tips for Azure Cloud-PartII

Cloud computing comes with myriad benefits with its various as-a-service models and hence most businesses consider it wise to move their IT infrastructure to cloud. However, many IT admins worry that hidden costs will lower their department’s total cost of ownership. 

We believe that it is more about estimating your requirements correctly and managing resources in the right way.

Microsoft Azure Pricing


Microsoft Azure allows you to quickly deploy infrastructures and services to meet all of your business needs. You can run Windows and Linux based applications in 22 Azure data-center regions, delivered with enterprise grade SLAs. Azure services come with:

  • No upfront costs
  • No termination fees
  • Pay only for what you use
  • Per minute billing

You can calculate your expected monthly bill using Pricing Calculator and track your actual account usage and bill at any time using the billing portal.


How To Save Cost On Azure Cloud?


1. Azure allows you to set a monthly spending limit on your account. So, if you forget to turn off your VMs, your Azure account will get disabled before you run over your predefined monthly spending limit. You can also set email billing alerts if your spend goes above a preconfigured amount.

2. It is not enough to shut down VMs from within the instance to avoid being billed because Azure continues to reserve the compute resources for the VM including a reserved public IP. Unless you need VMs to be up and running all the time, shut down and deallocate them to save on cost. This can be achieved from Azure Management portal or Windows Powershell.



3. Delete the unused VPN gateway and application gateway as they will be charged whether they run inside virtual network or connect to other virtual networks in Azure. Your account will be charged based on the time gateway is provisioned and available.



4. At least one VM is required to be running all the time, with one reserved IP included in 5 reserved public IP in use, in order to avoid reserved IP address charges. If you down all your VMs in service, then Microsoft is likely to reassign that IP to some other customer’s cloud service, which can hamper your business.



5. Minimize the number of compute hours by using auto scaling. Auto scaling can minimize the cost by reducing the total compute hours so that the number of nodes on Azure scales up or down based on demand.



6. When an end-user's PC makes a DNS query, recursive DNS servers run by enterprises and ISPs cache the DNS responses. These cached responses don't incur charge as they don’t reach the Traffic Manager Name servers. The caching duration is determined by the "TTL" parameter in the original DNS response. With larger TTL value, you can reduce DNS query charges but it would result in longer end-user failover times. On the other hand, shorter TTL value will reduce caching resulting in more query counts against Traffic Manager Name server. Hence, configure TTL in Traffic Manager based on your business needs.

7. Blob storage offers a cost effective solution to store graphics data. Blob storage of type Table and Queue of 2 GB costs $0.14/month and type block blob costs just $0.05/month.

A SQL Database of similar capacity will cost $4.98/month. Hence, use blob storage to store images, videos and text files instead of storing in SQL Database.


To reduce the cost and increase the performance, put the large items in the blob storage and store the blob record key in SQL database.

Above tips will definitely help you cut cost on Azure and leverage the power of cloud computing to the best!

Related Articles : Cost Optimization Tips for Azure Series

Part 1: Cost Optimization Tips for Azure Cloud

Part 2: Cost Optimization Tips for Azure Cloud

Part 3: Cost Optimization Tips for Azure Cloud

41 comments:

  1. Great post. Very useful. Instead of writing scripts I went with an automated service to turn instances on/off. It has worked well for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. this is a very nice article. thank you for publishing this. i can understand this easily.

    devops training in chennai

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have read this post. collection of post is a nice one Azure Online Training Get more knowledge

    ReplyDelete
  4. Really it was an awesome article...very interesting to read..You have provided an nice article....Thanks for sharing..
    Devops Training in Chennai | Devops Training Institute in Chennai

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello, I read your blog occasionally, and I own a similar one, and I was just wondering if you get a lot of spam remarks? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much lately it’s driving me insane, so any assistance is very much appreciated.
    Data science Course Training in Chennai |Best Data Science Training Institute in Chennai
    RPA Course Training in Chennai |Best RPA Training Institute in Chennai
    AWS Course Training in Chennai |Best AWS Training Institute in Chennai

    ReplyDelete
  6. Aw, this was a really nice post. Taking a few minutes and actual effort to create a great, It's awesome to pay a visit this web site and reading the views of all friends regarding this. also check my post on why Google Cloud Next is the Most Amazing High Tech Summit Ever

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you for the informative post about Security challenges in AWS , Found it useful . cloud migration services have now become secured and with no-risk
    Cloud Migration services

    Aws Cloud Migration services

    Azure Cloud Migration services

    ReplyDelete
  8. We are a part of the success story for many of our customer's successful cloud Migrations.

    Vmware Cloud Migration services

    Database Migration services

    ReplyDelete
  9. As the growth of Big data implementation services , it is essential to spread knowledge in people. This meetup will work as a burst of awareness.

    ReplyDelete
  10. thanks for amazing tips at SynergisticIT offer the best azure training course in california

    ReplyDelete
  11. tools that automate and scale events personalize attendee experiences and deliver positive ROI. event marketing and thank you note for helping with event

    ReplyDelete
  12. really useful
    devOps training in chennai |DevOps Course in Chennai

    https://www.credosystemz.com/training-in-chennai/devops-training-chennai/

    ReplyDelete
  13. Big Data Companyis a top-notch organization that focuses on all aspects of Big Data analytics, from Hadoop to MapR. They have been in business for years and have handled some of the most challenging Big Data problems in the industry. If you want to become a Big Data expert, or develop a Big Data strategy for your company, Big Data company can help you.

    ReplyDelete