Impact of Azure Disk type on Azure cost management

ANIMESH SARKAR — Thu, 01 May 2025 08:18:03 +0000

Azure Disk Storage provides block-level storage for Azure Virtual Machines, offering high durability, scalability, and security. It includes five types of managed disks:

Ultra Disks (Data Disk)
Premium SSD v2 (Data Disk)
Premium SSD (OS Disk & Data Disk)
Standard SSD (OS Disk & Data Disk)
Standard HDD (OS Disk & Data Disk)

Ultra Disks and Premium SSD v2 options are not available as OS disk.

These disks are automatically managed by Azure, meaning users only need to specify the disk type and size, while Azure handles provisioning and maintenance.

Azure Disks are a key component of storage in Azure, especially for Virtual Machines (VMs), and they can significantly impact overall cost depending on several factors.
In this article we will discuss mainly on selection of OS Disks and their impact on overall cost.

OS Disks mainly comes with following three options.
Premium SSD
Standard SSD
Standard HDD

We will discuss one by one below in short.

Premium SSD

i. High performance, low latency disks.
ii. Best for production workloads like databases, high-transaction systems
iii. High cost due to IOPS and throughput capabilities.

Below is the snap of a basic windows virtual machine pricing with Premium SSD

Standard SSD

i. Lower-cost SSD option
ii. Good for web servers, dev/test, and general-purpose workloads
iii. Moderate cost, lower performance than Premium SSD

A snap of a basic windows virtual machine pricing with Standard SSD is given below

Standard HDD

i. Magnetic disk drives for low-cost, low-performance storage.
ii. Ideal for backups, infrequent access, archival.

Below is the price of a basic windows virtual machine with Standard HDD

if you clearly go through the above images, you will see that how pricing is changing with the selection of different kind of disk drives.

For better understanding a comparison chart is given below:-
Here we have taken 128Gib as an example.
It can be clearly visible that price or cost is varying for different disk categories keeping the storage size constant.

Conclusion:-
A. Choosing the over-provisioned disk type increases cost unnecessarily.
B. Match disk type and size to workload.
C. Regularly review and if required delete unattached disks.
D. Monthly audit to detect over-provisioned disk type and down-grade them as per requirement

Installing Docker on Ubuntu

ANIMESH SARKAR — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:28:04 +0000

Docker is an open-source platform that allows developers to build, ship, and run applications in containers.
Docker containers are portable, meaning they can run consistently across different operating systems and environments (development, testing, production). This eliminates the "works on my machine" issue, ensuring applications behave predictably regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
In this post we will discuss how to install docker on ubuntu operating systems or on ubuntu virtual machines.
so without further delay, let's start.
The first method is :-

power on your ubuntu system or launch ubuntu virtual machine on
Azure or AWS or GCP .
Open terminal if you are in GUI mode or for virtual machines "ssh" into the virtual machines.
Take the root user privilege with the help of following command
Update the local packages
Run the following command

Above command downloads the script get-docker.sh to your local system/virtual machine from https://get.docker.com/
To install the above script (get-docker.sh) run the following command

The get-docker.sh installs the latest stable release of Docker on Linux
Enable docker services
Check the status of docker service if it is running or not

The above command shows the following output of docker is running

and it is showing in green that docker service is active and running.
Start the docker daemon

To check docker service run the following command

The above command pulls the image "hello-world" from docker hub to your local system/virtual machine executes it and throws a hello message.
The out put is as follows.

The second method is :-

power on your ubuntu system or launch ubuntu virtual machine on
Azure or AWS or GCP .
Open terminal if you are in GUI mode or for virtual machines "ssh" into the virtual machines.
Take the root user privilege with the help of following command
Update the local packages
Install docker
Enable docker services
Check the status of docker service if it is running or not

The above command shows the following output of docker is running

and it is showing in green that docker service is active and running.
Start the docker daemon

Note:- although The docker service starts automatically on Debian based distributions but it is advisable the check the services by using systemctl command as shown in this article.

DEV Community: ANIMESH SARKAR

Impact of Azure Disk type on Azure cost management

Installing Docker on Ubuntu