Azure Costs & Tools

• There’s always the challenge of balancing cost against performance.

Usage meters

• 📝 Used to determine Azure costs for each billing period
• When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates one or more meter instances for that resource.
  • They are charged based on usage
• The meters track the resources’ usage, and generate a usage record that is used to calculate your bill.
• Each meter tracks a particular kind of usage.
• The usage that a meter tracks correlates to a number of billable units.
  • Those units are charged to your account for each billing period.
• E.g. when you deploy a single virtual machine:
  • Azure might have following meters tracking:
    • Compute Hours, IP Address Hours
    • Data Transfer In, Data Transfer Out
    • Standard Managed Disk, Standard Managed Disk Operations
    • Standard IO-Disk, Standard IO-Block Blob Read, Standard IO-Block Blob Write, Standard IO-Block Blob Delete
  • 📝❗If you de-allocate a VM you’ll not pay for it. However, your persistent disks remain in your subscription that you pay for.
• Meters and pricing vary per product
• Often have different pricing tiers based on the size or capacity of the resource.

Billing

• At the end of each monthly billing cycle:
  • the usage values are charged to your payment method
  • the meters are reset
• Check the billing page in the Azure portal:
  • summary of your current usage
  • any invoices from past billing cycles

Factors affecting costs

Resource type

• Costs are resource-specific
• The usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on the resource type.
• The rate per billable unit depends on the resource type you are using.

Services

• Enterprise, Web Direct, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers
• Azure usage rates and billing periods can differ between them.
• Some subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs.
• Different billing structure apply to products and services from third-party vendors are available in the Azure Marketplace

Location

• Varies based on popularity, demand, and local infrastructure costs in a location.
• See choose low cost locations and regions.

Bandwidth

• Bandwidth = data moving in and out of Azure datacenters.
• 💡📝 Mostly inbound data (data to Azure) transfers are free.
  • Outbound data transfers (from Azure to outside) costs based on Billing Zones
    • Moving data between Azure regions counts as outbound data transfer.

Billing zone

• A Zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes.
• Each zone has different outbound data transfer prices.
• Zones:
  • Zone 1: United States, US Government, Europe, Canada, UK, France, Switzerland
  • Zone 2: East Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, India, Korea
  • Zone 3: Brazil, South Africa, UAE
  • DE Zone 1: Germany.

Tools

Azure pricing calculator

• Free web-based tool: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
• Get estimate costs without deploying and running those services or without manually pricing out each service from the Azure service pricing pages.
  • 📝 Can save results in your Azure account, export as Excel or shared as an URL.
• You select Azure services and modify properties and options of the services.
  • Outputs the costs per service and total cost for the full estimate
  • Modifiable properties:
    • Region: E.g. Southeast Asia, central Canada, western United States, northern Europe…
    • Tier: E.g. Free Tier, Basic Tier, etc.
    • Billing Options: Per type of customers and subscriptions for a chosen product.
    • Support Options: Included / paid support options.
    • Programs and Offers: Available price offerings according to your customer or subscription type.
    • Azure Dev/Test Pricing: Available if subscription is based on a Dev/Test offer.
• On the pricing calculator page, you’ll see several tabs:
  • Products. Lists all Azure services, 📝 allows you put together services for your estimate.
    • Customizable e.g. for VMs you select region, OS, size, running hours.
  • Example Scenarios. Common solutions to add all the components, e.g. VMs + load balancer.
  • Saved Estimates. Your previously saved estimates.
  • FAQ

Azure Advisor

• Free service that provides recommendations on
  • 📝 high availability, security, performance, operational excellence, and cost.
• Analyzes your deployed services and gives personalized recommendations.
• Cost recommendation areas:
  • Reduce costs by eliminating unprovisioned Azure ExpressRoute circuits
    • Finds circuits that have been in the provider status of Not Provisioned for more than one month.
    • Recommends deleting the circuit.
  • Buy reserved instances to save money over pay-as-you-go
    • Analyzes your VM usage over the last 30 days,
    • Determines & shows if you could save money in the future by purchasing reserved instances.
    • Shows the regions and sizes where you potentially have the most savings
  • Right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines
    • Monitors your virtual machine usage for 14 days.
    • Identifies underutilized virtual machines, allows you to scale down/iin to reduce your costs.
    • E.g. VMS with average CPU utilization of <= 5% (adjustable up to 20%)
    • E.g. network usage <= 7 MB for +4 days.

Azure Cost Management

• Free tool that for greater insights into costs.
• You can set budgets, schedule reports, and analyze your cost areas.
  • 📝 Historical breakdowns of services
  • Tracking against budget that’s set

Azure TCO calculator

• Compares on-prem vs cloud costs.
  1. Describe your infrastructure: servers, databases, storages, networking
  2. Adjust assumptions: adjust values for e.g. VM costs, electricity costs, IT labor costs.
  3. Compare costs & see how much you can save
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• Web-based tool: azure.microsoft.com/pricing/tco
• TCO = Total Cost of Ownership