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