Cost Optimization Tips for Azure Cloud-Part I

In general there are quite a few driving forces behind rapid adoption of cloud platforms off late, but within the industry Cost saving has been one of the most talked about reasoning. Though the key benefit from public cloud providers like Azure is its pay-as-you-go pricing model which makes customers immune of any capital investment.

But still If you observer it closely ,you will notice that the expenses in cloud start to add up and can soon get out of control if we are not practicing effective cost management. It needs attention and care to “Take Control over Your Cloud Costs” and decide about a better cost management strategy.

Under these Articles I will try to outline few of the Azure’s cost saving and optimization considerations .Its gonna be 3 part article first of this can be subtitled as “7 consideration for highly effective azure architecture “ because it covers the stuff from an architect’s point of view---

1. Design for Elasticity

Elasticity has been one of the fundamental properties of Azure that drives many of its economic benefits. By designing you architecture for elasticity you will avoid Over Provisioning of resources, that way you should always restrict yourself to use only what is needed. There are umbrella of service in azure which helps customers getting rid of under-utilization of resources. (Always make use of services like VM scale set & Auto scaling).

2. Leverage Azure Application Services (Notification, Queue, Service Bus etc.)

Application services in azure doesn’t only help you in performance optimization but they can greatly affect the cost of overall infrastructure. Judicially decide on which all are the service needed for your workload and provision them in optimum way. Make use of the existing service don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
When you install software’s to suffice the requirements there is a benefit of Customize features but the trade-off is immense you have to have an instance for this which intern restrict the availability of these software’s by tying in to a particular VM. Whereas if you choose different services from Azure you enjoy the inbuilt Availability, Scalability and High Performance with option of Pay as you go.

3. Always Use Resource Group

Keep the related resource in close proximity that way you can save money on communication among the services in addition to that application will get boost on performance as latency would no longer be a factor. In the latter articles I will specifically talk about other benefits this particular service can offer.

4. Off Load From Your Architecture

Try to offload as much as possible by distributing things to their more suited services it doesn’t only reduce the maintenance headache but help in optimizing the cost too.Move the session related data out of server, Optimize the infrastructure for performance and cost by caching and edge caching static content.

Combine Multiple JS & CSS files into one and then perform the Compression for minification. Once bundled into compressed form move them to azure blob.When you’re content (Static content) is popular frontend it with Azure Content delivery network. Use Blob + Azure CDN as it will reduce the cost as well as latency (depends on cache-hit ratio).For anything related to media streaming make use of Azure CDN as it frees you from running Adobe FMS.

5. Caching And Compression For CDN Content

After analyzing multiple Customer subscriptions, we can derive a pattern of modest to huge CDN spends. As a common practice, customers would have forgotten to enable caching for CDN resources either at origin servers like Azure Blob. You should enable compression for content like CSS, JavaScript, Text Files, JSON, HTML etc. to ensure cost savings on bandwidth. Also, frequently deploy production changes and often forget to enable caching & compression for static resources, dynamic content like text/HTML/JSON etc. We recommend you to have post-deploy job as a part of your release automation to ensure client side caching, server-side compression etc. are enabled for your application and resources.

6. Continuous Optimization In Your Architecture

If you are using Azure for the past few years, there is high possibility of using outdated services, Though once designed you should not do too much tinkering with architecture but it’s good to have a look and see if there are things which can be replaced with new generation service. They might be best fit for the workload and can offer same results in less expenses. Always match resources with the workload.
With that it doesn’t only give you instant benefits but offers you recurring savings in your next month’s bill.

7. Optimize The Provisioning Based On Consumption Trend

You need to be aware of what you are using. There is no need of wasting your money on expensive instances or services if you don’t need them. Automatically turn off what you don’t need, there are services like Azure Automation which can help you achieving that.Make use of azure service like auto-scaling, VM scale set and azure automation for uninterrupted services even when traffic tends to increase beyond expectations.Special mention for Azure DevTest- a service specially designed for Development and testing scenarios. With this service azure helps end users to model their infrastructure where they will be charged only for office hours (usually 8*5) these settings are customizable which makes it even more flexible.While dealing with Azure storage, make use of Appropriate Storage Classes with required redundancy options. Service like File Storage, Page-Blob, Block-Blob etc. have their specific purpose so be clear while designing your architecture.

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