Manage the Cost of your Cloud Resources

#azurepricing #pricingcalculator #minimisecost #cost

Cloud Computing is becoming popular in the business environment. As a matter of fact, it has come to stay and it is transforming the mode of operations and management of business processes in organisations. That is, those who have chosen to migrate their operations to the Cloud environment. There are many benefits in migrating to the cloud. These include reduction in cost of operations, flexibility and scalability, security, better compliance to industry rules and regulations, improved recovery plans, easy management and monitoring of operations and business processes.
In this Blog, we will look into how to optimise cost when using Cloud resources.

Microsoft Azure has a very valuable tool for this and its known as Azure Pricing Calculator. It is used to estimate the cost of azure products and services an organisation plan to use. This enables the management to plan effectively by choosing only what is needed for each business operation. The Management will also know the cost of their operations in using Azure resources before those resources are being used.

However, there are some important factors that affects the cost of Azure resources being chosen or selected by any organisation. These are:

1.Type of Resource: There are different types of resources like virtual machine, storage accounts etc

2.Type of service: There are Enterprise, Web Direct and Cloud Service Provider customers. The usage rates and billing periods differ for these customers

3.Location:Resource pricing varies from one region to another. Varying costs between regions can be attributed to cost incurred for cooling, demand for resources etc

4.Bandwith: Some inbound data transfers are free while pricing of outbound data transfer are based on Zones

5.Reserved Instances:Using Azure Reservations can reduce the cost of your resources with up to 72% on pay-as-you-go billing.

6.Azure Hybrid Benefits:This enables you to use your on premise licenses on Azure at a minimised cost

In this blogpost, we will use the Azure Pricing Calculator to generate cost for an azure Virtual Machine and other related resources.
In few quick steps, lets take a look at how Azure Pricing Calculator is used.

Step 1
Type in Azure Pricing Calculator into your browser and search for it

Step 2
Click on "Pricing Calculator|Microsoft Azure" as shown in the image below

It will take you to the page displayed below

On the pane by the lefthand side, you will see a list of category of different products and services available on azure ranging from the Popular ones to Hybrid + Multicloud

Step 3
We will go with the Popular Category. Here I will select Virtual Machine, Storage accounts, Azure SQL Database and App Service as shown in the images below

Step 4
Scroll down to Virtual Machine and select Region,I will choose North Europe

Step 5
Go to the Savings option. In this section you will be able to minimise your cost of resources based on the options you choose. Lets explore these options.
(a)Default option of Pay as you go without checking other options

In the above picture, the average cost for the Compute Service is $78.11 and Operating System $67.16 bringing Monthly Average billing to a total of $145.27

(b) Lets look at another scenario aimed at minimising cost
Under the Saving plan, Click on 1-year saving plan.

The Compute service is now $67.65 bringing the total monthly billing down to $134.81 from $145.27

(c)Let's take a step further. Click on 3-year saving plan

The Compute service is now $53.38 bringing the total monthly billing down to $120.54 from $134.81

(d)Another cool option for minimising cost is Azure Hybrid benefits. Click on it

This is thrilling! With Azure Hybrid Benefits and 3-year saving plan, the cost of Operating System is $0 and the total monthly billing is now $53.38.Thats a huge cost saving, from $145.27 in (a) above

Step 6
To make use of this Price Estimate for taking management decisions, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "Export"