$$$$ saving Azure features in 2022

Last year, there's a lot going on in the world of Azure.
But the questions we hear are always/always/always about how much we spend $$$$, here are few services which gave me some cost-saving opportunities at the invoice.

AKS

• Scale-down Mode removes the need to pre-provision nodes and pre-pull container images, saving you cost.
  

  

  Use Scale-down Mode for your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster - Azure Kubernetes Service | Microsoft Learn

  Learn how to use Scale-down Mode in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

  learn.microsoft.com

• AKS node pool start/stop feature allows you to completely stop specific user node pools and pick up later where you left off with a switch of a button.
  

  

  Start and stop a node pool on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - Azure Kubernetes Service | Microsoft Learn

  Learn how to start or stop a node pool on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

  learn.microsoft.com

Compute

• VMSS containing both Spot VMs and standard VMs.
  

  

  Now in Preview – Spot priority mix for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets - Microsoft Community Hub

  Today we are announcing the preview of Spot priority mix for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) with flexible orchestration. This new capability allows you to create and expand a VM (virtual machine) scale set containing both Spot VMs and standard VMs. You will now have the flexibility to run a...

  techcommunity.microsoft.com

• Spot VMs support in Azure Batch
  

  

  Run workloads on cost-effective Spot VMs - Azure Batch | Microsoft Learn

  Learn how to provision Spot VMs to reduce the cost of Azure Batch workloads.

  learn.microsoft.com

Cosmos DB

• Autoscaling RU/s starts from 100, previously it's 400.

• serverless container storage limit increase to 1TB.
  

  

  Consumption-based serverless offer in Azure Cosmos DB | Microsoft Learn

  Learn more about Azure Cosmos DB's consumption-based serverless offer.

  learn.microsoft.com

Machine learning

• Automatically shuts down inactive compute instances.
  

  Create and manage a compute instance - Azure Machine Learning | Microsoft Learn

  Learn how to create and manage an Azure Machine Learning compute instance. Use as your development environment, or as compute target for dev/test purposes.

  learn.microsoft.com

Analytics

• Stream Analytics jobs now support native autoscaling.
  

  

  Azure Stream Analytics autoscale streaming units | Microsoft Learn

  This article explains how you can use different scaling methods for your Stream Analytics job to make sure you have the right number of streaming units.

  learn.microsoft.com

• Azure Databricks SQL Serverless.
  

  

  Enable serverless SQL warehouses - Azure Databricks - Databricks SQL | Microsoft Learn

  Learn about serverless SQL warehouses and how to manage them.

  learn.microsoft.com

Networking

• Azure Firewall introduced a Basic tier.

Azure Backup

• Azure Backup added support for zone-redundant storage.

With the zone-redundant storage (ZRS) vault, the backups replicate synchronously across three availability zones in a region. It enables you to perform successful restores and recover your data even if a zone goes down.

Storage

• Azure Storage added the ability to create an additional 5000 storage accounts per subscription

• New Premium SSD v2 disk storage.

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Comments

[thebernardlim]

Thanks for sharing! For Compute, I might add there are "Azure Savings plan" or "Azure Reserved Instances" too. Cheers.

[Karthi S N]

thanks @thebernardlim 👍for adding two more features to the list.

Much appreciated, keep it going, Cheers 😁