Hey Hi, here in this article, I will be speaking about concept of Azure Cloud Cost Management and Optimization techniques, strategy and process to manage your azure spending and as well as optimize expenses without compromising availability, performance and flexibility of your mission critical applications on Azure. Let's dive into the topics.
Azure Cost Management:
Microsoft Azure Cost Management is a built-in service tool in azure portal that gives you a breakdown of the usage and cost of your Azure resources. This Cost Management tool allows you to see what is costing you money and how it compares against your budget and also helps to understand the Azure invoice and to manage azure billing account and subscriptions.
Azure Cost Optimization: What is Cost Optimization in Azure?
Azure Cost Optimization is an approach to find out the ways that helps to reduce the cost of your workload in Azure environment. Finding unused or underutilized resources will help to optimize cost and providing value to the business, at the lowest possible cost.
Azure Cloud Cost Optimization Techniques/Cost Saving Tips:
Right-sizing: Adjust the size and capacity of resources to match the requirements of your workload. Use Azure Advisor to recommend resource configurations that can optimize costs.
Example Azure VM Resize: right sizing the Azure VMs according to the needs based on monitoring CPU and Memory usage insights.
Shut down unused resources: Shut down unused resources to avoid unnecessary costs. Use Azure Automation or Azure Logic Apps to automate the process.
Example 1: Enabling Auto Start and Stop for Azure VMs. Azure VM Snoozing: Schedule Server Start up and Shutdown on schedule time using Azure Automation Runbooks.
Example 2: Shutdown Azure Virtual Machines or Virtual Machine Scale Sets if not in use or not being used any more.
Example 3: Shutdown the VMs properly. Azure VM status should be Stopped (deallocated).
Azure Hybrid Benefit: Leverage Azure Hybrid Benefit to use existing on-premises licenses to save on Azure VMs and SQL Server.
Example: Using Azure Hybrid benefits to save azure resource cost - Azure KMS, Images.
Reserved Instances: Purchase Azure Reserved VM Instances to get discounts of up to 72% off pay-as-you-go prices.
Example: Buy reserved Azure instances to save money over pay-as-you-go subscription costs.
Storage optimization: Use Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management to automatically move infrequently accessed data to lower-cost tiers.
Use Serverless Computing: Use serverless computing with Azure Functions or Logic Apps to scale applications automatically and pay only for what is used.
Tagging: Use Azure Resource Manager tags to identify and group resources. This can help track usage and manage costs more effectively.
Cloud-native applications: Design and deploy cloud-native applications that are optimized for the cloud and use Azure services such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Cache for Redis, and Azure Stream Analytics to help optimize costs.
Monitoring and optimization: Monitor your resource usage with Azure Monitor and use Azure Cost Management + Billing to track and optimize costs.
More Cloud Cost Optimization Techniques:
- Optimize costs without impacting RPO by using differential or incremental backup for database workloads.
- Make use of Azure Free Services to reduce cost.
- Designing an optimized solution for front-end web applications will save you a lot of cost in azure. Designing a Azure Service Plan and using it across subscriptions for best cost optimization.
- Delete Bastion Host when the service is not in use to reduce the resource usage cost.
- Delete Application Gateway when the service is not in use.
One should always review and adjust azure resource usage to ensure that you are optimizing costs to meet your business needs.
Clean-up Unused Azure Resources to Save Cost:
Find and delete the unused or unattached Azure resources like orphaned managed disks (OS Disks and Data Disks), orphan Network Interfaces (NICs), orphaned Network Security Groups (NSGs), orphaned Public IP Addresses (PIPs), Older Azure Disk Snapshots, Availability Sets and more.
Azure Storage Cost Optimization:
- Use Azure Blob Storage: Azure Blob Storage is a cost-effective option for storing unstructured data such as images, videos, and documents.
- Use Azure Data Lake Storage: Azure Data Lake Storage is a cost-effective option for storing large amounts of data that is infrequently accessed.
- Use Azure File Storage: Azure File Storage is a cost-effective option for storing files that are frequently accessed.
- Enable Azure storage tiering: Azure storage tiering allows you to automatically move data to the appropriate storage tier based on how frequently it is accessed.
- Use Azure storage lifecycle management: Azure storage lifecycle management allows you to automatically delete or archive data that is no longer needed.
- Use Azure storage analytics: Azure storage analytics allows you to track storage usage and costs, and optimize your storage usage.
- Use Azure reserved capacity: Azure reserved capacity allows you to save up to 80% on storage costs by committing to a one-year or three-year term.
- Use Azure Data Factory: Azure Data Factory enables you to move, process and transform data across various data stores, including Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Blob Storage and more, it also allows you to set rules to automatically move data to the most cost-effective storage option based on your data usage patterns.
- Use Azure Archive storage: Azure archive storage is a cost-effective option for storing data that is rarely accessed and is intended for long-term retention.