Skip to content

Cost Management and Service Level Agreements

Planning and Managing costs

  • Factors that affect costs

  • REsource types

  • Services
  • Locations

  • Ingress and egress traffic

  • Minimize costs

  • Azure Advisor (cost tab)

  • Auto shutdown dev/qa resources
  • Utilize cool/archive storage where possible
  • Reserved instances (Hybrid Benefit)
  • Alerts when billing exceeds an expected level
  • Policies to restrict access to certain expensive resources (E.g., cannot run a VM with more than 16 cpus)
  • Auto scaling resources (shrink as required)
  • Downsize when resources over-provisioned
  • Ensure every resource has an owner (tags). (Whose is this resource?)
  • Azure Cost management: analyze spending
  • Azure Functions: 1 million executions free per month. $0.20 per million executions. Cheapest VM is $20 per month
  • Microsoft has economy of scale to give you the cheaper price

  • Spot pricing: Ability to use a VM when nobody is using it for a discounted price. When someone needs to use it, you get kicked off

  • Consumption model

  • Pay per usage: Functions

  • Pay per time: VMs
  • pay for bandwith: Pay for outbound data (inbound is free)

Pricing calculator

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

  • Microsoft makes a promise about the service quality they offer
  • VM: 99,99% for multiple Availability Zones, 99,95% for same Availability Set, 99,90% for single instance
  • For composite SLA, simply multiply the SLAs
  • Add redundancy to increase the SLA

Preview features