Azure Cost Optimization: A Complete Guide
Azure is a cloud computing platform by Microsoft that provides a wide range of cloud services and solutions. The services include data storage and transfer through an online cloud network. It follows a pay-per-user model, meaning you only pay for the service you opt for.
In this blog, we will understand how you can optimise Azure cost and leverage cloud computing service for your organisation.
Why is Azure cost optimization important?
Organizations can use cost optimization to track spending on a specific department or service. This may be beneficial in terms of budgetary arrangements. It can offer assistance to make strides in operational efficiency while ensuring that assets are utilized viably. This may lead to expanded efficiency and execution. Fetched investigation helps within the recognizable proof of past benefit employments and costs, as well as the expectation of future needs.
Cost analysis aids in the identification of previous service uses and expenses, as well as the prediction of future needs. Without proper cost optimization, businesses risk receiving unexpectedly high Azure bills, compromising their financial health and ability to invest in other critical areas.
Azure cost optimization tools and services
- Azure cost management and billing: Azure cost management and billing provide detailed insight into your spending. It allows you to track your spending by location, resource, service, and more. It helps to monitor your spending. You can use Azure Cost Management and Billing to create budgets to keep track of your spending and set alerts to notify you when you are about to go over your budget. You can also analyze your spending patterns over time to forecast future costs.
- Azure Advisor: Based on your configuration and usage, Azure Advisor will customize recommendations for you. Your cost, performance, security, and dependability are all optimized as a result. It can detect underutilized or unused resources, which you can shrink or shut down to save money.
- Azure Pricing Calculator: This tool allows you to calculate the price of Azure services before you use them. The calculator allows you to enter your anticipated resource usage and will calculate an approximate cost. This tool is especially useful if you are planning a new workload or thinking about moving to Azure. Understanding the potential costs upfront allows you to make more informed decisions and avoid surprises.
- Azure Monitor: Azure Monitor offers insights into the network infrastructure and performance of applications. Although its main purpose is performance monitoring, it can also yield insightful information on cost optimization. For example, Azure Monitor can help you determine whether resources are being overutilized or underutilized, allowing you to make changes to reduce your costs. It can also help you monitor your resource utilization over time, providing insight into your spending habits.
- Azure resource graph: You can examine your Azure resources at scale with the help of this service. It makes managing and optimizing your resources easier by giving you a single, unified view of them across all of your subscriptions. With Azure Resource Graph, you can quickly identify resources that are not in use or are underutilized, allowing you to reduce unnecessary spending. It also enables you to visualize your resource usage, helping you understand your spending patterns better.
Steps to follow for Azure cost optimization
- Automated Azure cost management: If you are trying to analyze the Azure cost via spreadsheets, it’s too time-consuming and annoying. Additionally, cloud cost optimization solutions that automate the processes of aggregation, analysis, and reporting are required for ongoing cost control in Azure. Recommendation: Examine the resources covered in the preceding best practice. Make sure your solution is reliable, so you won’t need to employ many Azure cost optimization tools at once.
- Continuous monitoring: A continuous monitoring process can help in cost optimization. Your Azure cloud is dynamic, so your resource utilization and associated costs are constantly changing. continuous monitoring helps you detect cost anomalies in real-time, preventing potential issues from becoming expensive problems. In addition, it helps you quickly identify the root cause of the cost anomaly, enabling you to fix the issue and prevent future budget overruns.
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Utilizing Azure Budgets and Alerts: Azure budget and alert tools provide you the ability to set a budget for your Azure spending and receive alerts when your spending approaches or exceeds your budget. It enables you to manage your money wisely and steer clear of any unforeseen expenses. Additionally, Azure alerts allow you to receive instant notifications when your consumption approaches your budget. This helps you avoid service interruptions from overspending by giving you enough time to increase your budget or modify your usage.
- Tag your Azure resources: with the help of Azure, you can identify your resources using plain text key-value pairs. You can set tags according to your needs. For example, by adding a key called Environment, you can use a deployment environment to track your resources. You can label the resources you deploy to production with a value like Production to describe them. The key-value pair when combined means Environment = Production, which is an identifier that shows up in your Azure resource usage and cost reports.
- Consider the Azure Hybrid model: With the Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can transfer your software-guaranteed on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to Azure and save a lot of money. You can run Windows Server and SQL Server workloads on Azure at a discounted rate with Azure Hybrid Benefit, which offers significant savings over pay-as-you-go costs.
- Configure virtual machine auto-scaling: Autoscaling is the process of creating rules that specify how your Azure virtual machine’s compute, memory, network, and storage capacities will continuously grow or shrink in response to the demands of your workload. Azure Autoscale reduces costs while also improving performance. It reduces operating costs by turning off redundant virtual machines (VMs) when peak performance is no longer needed.
- Cost anomaly identification & alert: You can identify possible issues before they become expensive failures with the aid of a real-time cost anomaly identification tool.
How LeasePacket can help you in Azure cost optimization
- Containerization and Orchestration
- Mainframe migration
- Monitoring & Alerting with Azure Cloud, and Elasticsearch integration
- Security and compliance management on Azure
- Azure cloud-native microservices infrastructure and DevOps
- Azure Infrastructure set-up and modernization
- Storage and Database Management
- Azure APIs infrastructure
- Azure migration
- Azure Data Lake
- Data streaming with Azure, DynamoDB, and more
- Azure Infrastructure set-up and modernization
- Real-time streaming & analytics infrastructure
- Datacenter modernization using Azure databases and storage
- Customized Azure Architecture with multi-cloud strategy