AZ-104 Certification Notes

Chapter 3.6 - Managing Azure Costs

What Impacts Costs?

• Subscription Type
  • Free, pay-as-you-go, Enterprise Agreement, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)
• Resource Type
  • For example, storage account Blob storage vs. Table storage
• Usage Meters
  • Utilities like overall CPU time, ingress/egress network traffic, and disk size
• Resource Usage
  • The costs of actually using a resource
• Location
  • The costs for various services vary across geographical regions

Cost Best Practices and Tools

• Best Practices
  • Select the appropriate resource for the use case
  • Understand resource needs (sizing)
  • Deallocate resources when not needed
  • Use cloud capabilities where possible (e.g., scalability, elasticity)
    • Scalability in cloud computing is the ability to quickly and easily increase or decrease the size or power of an IT solutions or resource
    • Elastic computing is the ability to quickly expand or decrease computer processing, memory, and storage resources to meet changing demands without worrying about capacity planning and engineering for peak usage.
  • Plan costs prior to purchase
• Cost Tools
  • Pricing Calculator
    • Can be used to create quotes of workloads that we define so that we understand how much they will cost us before we actually provision any of those resources
  • Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
    • This tool will help to understand how much workloads we have running on-prem would cost us if we were to run the equivalent workloads on Azure
  • Microsoft Cost Management
    • This tool allows to analyze costs by performing specific cost analysis functions
    • Helps to create budgets

Key Takeaways

• Pricing Calculator
  • Estimate workload costs for prospective workloads
• TCO Calculator
  • Compare costs to determine cost savings between on-premises and cloud solutions
• Microsoft Cost Management
  • Analyze costs, apply filtering, and create budgets