Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft. At DSP-Explorer we are leading UK Microsoft Gold Partners offering specialist guidance and support for your business to make the most of the opportunities Azure has to offer.
This post explores some of the ways you can manage and reduce your costs in Microsoft Azure in order to optimise your services and use Azure to your business's advantage.
Cost Management
Cost Analysis
You can analyse your Azure costs in many different ways. Cost analysis has five built-in views, optimised for the most common goals:
- Accumulated cost
- Daily cost
- Cost by service
- Cost by resource
- Invoice details
Being able to view your costs in a range of different ways depending on your priorities makes it extremely easy to manage your costs in Microsoft Azure.
Tagging
Tags are metadata elements that you apply to your Azure resources. They are key-value pairs that help you identify resources based on settings that are relevant to your organisation. Tags are flexible and you can create them for pretty much anything, design your tags to fit your organisation and categorise resources in your own way. Assigning tags to resources can help with grouping your billing data, you can also use tags to categorize costs by the runtime environment.
Budgets
You can set a budget with notification of the total expenditure of a certain Azure subscription, notifying you when you are nearing your budget. If this is earlier than expected you are then able to react in advance in order to manage this cost.
Policies
Setting policies keeps you in control, allowing you to place limits on certain variables of your spending and management. Unlike budgeting, this is a preventative measure designed to limit certain factors to reduce costs and mistakes.Some examples include limiting the number, size and/or security of resources that can be deployed.
Pricing Options
There are 3 different Azure subscription types:
- PAYG - Pay As You Go is the most simple subscription and perfect if you're new to Microsoft Azure. It gets you started straight away and you pay by your consumption.
- CSP - A Cloud Service Provider arranged by a Microsoft Partner who will manage your subscription for you. Not only can we provide this service but we can also ensure you receive the most competitive pricing and discounts. Find out more.
- EA - An Enterprise Agreement directly with Microsoft is set up for a certain period of time with a predetermined amount of Azure services. This involves a commitment to a certain spend despite which services you consume.
Hybrid Benefit
Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud. Microsoft lets you use your on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licences on Azure. Saving on server costs means you are only paying infrastructure costs for Azure.
Automation
- Auto Shutdown - Start or stop machines on a self-defined schedule. This feature provides a decentralized low-cost automation option for users who want to optimize their VM costs.
- Auto Scale - Schedule your virtual machines to scale up or down depending on the anticipated volume of services. Such as scheduling fewer virtual machines in advance during a historic period of slow online traffic in order to lower costs during this time.
- Scale Sets - Azure virtual machine scale sets let you create and manage a group of load-balanced VMs. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule.
If you would like to learn more about Microsoft Azure and how it can add value to your business, email us at enquiries@dsp.co.uk or book a meeting today...