Steps to Reduce the Azure Cost

In this blog, we will share few Steps to Reduce the Azure Cost.

AZURE REGION SELECTION

• Each region will have their own set of capabilities and services.

• We can move our resources to a less expensive azure region but we need to make sure the end-user should not face the latency issues.

• We can use the Azure latency test site www.azurespeed.com to understand network performance per region.

RIGHT SIZE FOR VMs

• We need to segregate between production and development/test environment VMs.

• Development and test environment VMs does not require high resources as production VMs.

• While creating new VM’s azure shoes the High-performance VM as default.

• Click on View All option to retrieve more VM options based on more needs.

• We can use two types of storage type for VMS. They are HDD and SSD. We can select the right type for our environment.

• The default disk type will be SSD. We can use the HDD type for development and test environment as a part of reducing the azure costs.

• The lowest type VM size type is A0.

• Minimum IOPS speed for HDD disk is 500 per disk. You can find more information at below URL.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/managed-disks/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/unmanaged-disks/

• Need to select the Azure Disk Type and VM Size wisely based on our environment needs.

RUNNING SERVICE AS A SERVICE

• To run an application on cloud, we need to create a VM and take care of computing, storage and licensing.

• Also, It required regular patching and update which is an additional headache for the administrator.

• To reduce these issues, We can use the Azure App service to launch our web application as a service.

• They are providing various types of app services such as web application with SQL.

• We need to verify our company security requirements before moving our application database into the cloud.

• Because these databases are on a shared resource, any misconfiguration will lead to database exploit.

• You can use the Azure calculator https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ to calculate your expenses in the Azure environment.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

• We need to add our azure resources into a Resource group to control the Azure costs.

• The resource group will have VM, storage, and other resources into a unit.

• We can easily remove the resource group when its no longer required.

• It avoids the housekeeping problem as an unused resource will affect our azure billing.

Thanks for reading this blog. We hope it was useful for you to reduce the Azure Cost for your environment.