Azure cost optimization, or Azure cost management, is a process that helps organizations reduce cloud costs. The goal is to create a balance between corporate needs and infrastructure utilization, reducing unnecessary costs as much as possible. Azure is a cloud platform and doesn't require upfront to set up the infrastructure. In addition, the services offered by Azure often provide customers with fine-grained control over a wide range of aspects, as well as better manage their costs. To keep costs at the desired level, organizations need to manage resource consumption correctly. Azure also offers organizations a wide range of tools and services dedicated to this purpose . However, to truly optimize costs, organizations need a high level of expertise and understanding of the Azure cloud.
In this article, we'll take a look at the top 8 ways you can save costs when investing in Azure and applying it to your company's IT strategy.
8 Ways to Save Cost with Azure
1. Manage Virtual Machine (VM) Storage: When you delete or disable a virtual machine (VM) in Azure, attached storage usually continues. This means that even if you are not actively using your storage disk, you will pay for it. Similarly, even if you have unused or unknown virtual machines, you continue to pay for them. To fix this, you need to ensure that all resources running on Azure are being actively used. Use the Azure portal to search for managed disks that you don't own or that aren't connected to any VMs. This allows you to save costs while retaining the option to restore the disk or VM in the future .
2. Use Storage Tiering: The Azure depolation model offers organizations several storage tiers. Although the Premium and Hot tiers have a higher cost, they offer the ability to be accessed quickly at any time. The Cool and Archive storage tiers cost GB per month is much lower, but they place limits on the frequency and speed at which you can access content and incur higher data retrieval charges. Using the right storage tier for each data type can be cost-effective. For example, you can automatically move rarely accessed data to a low-cost cold storage tier, saving you a large percentage of long-term ongoing storage costs.
3. Azure Spot Instances: Azure spot virtual machines offer discounts of up to 90 per cent compared to 'pay-as-you-go' prices for the same VM types. Spot instances refer to unused Azure compute capacity that you can bidon in the spot market. When Azure needs to regain capacity, the Azure infrastructure deletes the Spot VM with only 30 seconds of notice. Therefore, spot VMs are often also useful for disrupted workloads such as batch jobs, dev/test environments, and distributed computing workloads .
4. Use B-Series VMs: Azure is one of the convenient ways to support such workloads by providing B-Series VMs that are not always suitable for workloads that do not require high CPU performance but occasionally require more performance. B-series virtual machines detect when workloads aren't fully utilizing CPU capacity and accumulate credits. Other times, when the workload needs more performance, it uses these credits to achieve up to 100 percent vCPU performance. Identify servers that are not always in use, such as domain controllers, file servers, web servers, and small database servers. All of these servers tend to have sudden CPU usage. For these workloads, consider using B-series instances, which are significantly cheaper than regular virtual machines and can provide similar performance for this usage profile.
5. Azure Cost Management: Cost Management is a free tool built into the Azure portal. It collects data and provides analytics that can help you save costs on Azure services. Azure also provides additional tools for cost planning and optimization, including Azure Advisor, Cost Calculator, Cost Analysis, Azure Budgets and Cloudyn, which enable you to track resource usage and expenditure for Azure, among other clouds .
6.Shifting Workloads to Containers: Containers are lighter than virtual machines. You can run multiple containerized applications on a physical host, and in some cases up to dozens of containers per host. Repackaging your applications as containers can help reduce VM utilization and significantly lower your costs. Consider migrating applications from traditional Azure VMs to a container service such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
7. Migrate elastic data to TBytes: Azure SQL Database elastic pools are a simple and cost-effective solution for managing and scaling across multiple databases with varying and unpredictable usage demands . Databases in an elastic pool reside on a single server and share a certain number of resources at a certain price. Elastic pools in SQL data base allow software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to optimize price performance for a group of databases within a predetermined budget while providing performance flexibility for each database .
8. Monitor Your Application Dependencies: In addition to your SQL server, your application has other functions, such as queue handling and caching. Therefore, it is likely to include other dependencies and Azure features such as CosmosDB and Azure Storage. Azure Cache for Redis allows you to store your data in memory instead of disk, and processes requests in milliseconds, giving you fast cache operations and highly scalable data tiers. Microsoft Azure Service Bus can be used toseparate applications and services to build a reliable platform that can transfer data and state through containers. To get the most out of your Azure cost optimization efforts, ensure that all your dependencies can scale well and perform optimally.
