28 ways to reduce your Azure costs

As an Azure consultant, the following are some examples of what I have helped our clients with:

• Cloud architecture
• Cloud foundation
• Solution design
• Cloud deployment
• Cloud remediation
• Moving workloads to the cloud
• Consolidating subscriptions
• Automation
• Governance

Those are all very common and important types of engagements, however what has been in high demand for the last couple of years is the optimization of cloud spending. CIOs and managers are often challenged to explain why cloud spending is high and justify if the move to the cloud was the right call usually based on a single measurement – COST.

This article is all about ways to reduce and optimize the costs with workloads deployed specifically to Microsoft Azure.

The following are 28 ways to decrease your cloud spending without compromising performance, availability or scalability.

1.      The first and most obvious way of saving on your Azure spending is to keep your subscription(s) clean. Periodically perform a clean-up and remove resources which are not in use anymore.

2.      Stop VMs on times when they are not required. Most dev and test workloads are not required to be running 24/7. Leverage Azure automation and resource tagging to automate VM shutdown and start up.

3.      Build dev and test workloads on Dev/Test subscriptions. This type of subscription provides a discount on the price of selected resources such as Windows Virtual Machines. Basically, you pay the price of a Linux VM as you are not paying for the Windows license.

4.      Leverage the Azure Hybrid Benefit. This allows you to use your spare Windows Server Standard licenses on your Azure Windows Servers or concurrently for Windows Server Datacentre licenses. This is also applicable for Azure SQL Servers and SQL Servers running on Azure VMs. Save up to 40%.

5.      VM Reservations. Get a big discount when buying 1- or 3-years reservations for your VMs. Pay upfront or monthly. If you know some workloads will be running for at least 1 or 3 years buy reservations and save big!

6.      Blob Storage Reservation. Buy reserved capacity in chunks of 100TB or 1PB for your storage accounts and Azure Data Lake storage and save up to 38%. Reservations are available for all storage tiers for 1 year or 3 years.

7.      Azure SQL Database. Save on SQL Database compute costs by buying reserved vCores for 1 or 3 years. Note this is only available with the vCore model not DTU.

8.      Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Save up to 65% on SQL Data Warehouse costs by buying reserved capacity for 1 or 3 years.

9.      Azure Database for MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB. 1-year reservations are available providing savings of up to 51%!

10.  Azure Data Explorer. Save up to 30% with reservations for Azure Data Explorer.

11.  Azure Cosmos DB. Save up to 65% on Cosmos DB by buying reserved throughput capacity for 1 or 3 years.

12.  Premium SSD Managed Disks. Save up to 5% on 1-year reservations. It may not appear too much of a saving but premium disks are expensive and if you have a lot of them when adding up it will be a big cost cut. Reservations are only available for disks sizes of 1TB and larger.

13.  Azure Databricks. Save on your Azure Databricks costs by pre-purchasing DBUs for 1 or 3 years.

14.  Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Save on Red Hat OpenShift costs by pre-purchasing plans for 1 year.

15.  Azure SUSE Linux. Save on SUSE Linux enterprise server costs by pre-purchasing SUSE software for 1 or 3 years.

16.  Azure Red Hat Plans. Save on Red Hat costs by pre-purchasing plans for 1 or 3 years.

17.  Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. Save on VMware CloudSimple Node Instance costs by buying reserved instances for 1 or 3 years.

18.  App Services. Save on App Service Isolated Stamp Fee by buying a 3-years Reserved Instance.

19.  Use Lifecycle policy on your storage accounts. This feature allows you to enforce when blobs should be moved to cheaper tiers such as the cold and archive tiers or even when blobs should be deleted. If you know your files are accessed infrequently after 3 months and rarely after 6 months you could create a policy which would automatically move those files reducing your storage costs significantly.

20.  Backup your SQL workloads to block blob instead of page blob. Beginning with SQL 2016, you can now perform SQL backups to block blob which is much cheaper than page blob.

21.  Resize VMs which are not consuming much of the allocated resources. Azure Advisor will usually tell you if you have any VMs which should be resized due to over allocation of resources.

22.  Azure App Services. If you don’t need to scale your websites independently, consider consolidating them in the same App Plan.

23.  Azure SQL Elastic Pools. Combine databases which are not often used or databases which have peak resource consumption in different times of the day to allow them to share the available resources and generate extra savings on database costs.

24.  Use B-Series VMs. This VM family is cheaper than other VM families with same size. The B-series VMs are ideal for workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously, like web servers, proof of concepts, small databases and development build environments. These workloads typically have burstable performance requirements. The B-series provides you with the ability to purchase a VM size with baseline performance and the VM instance builds up credits when it is using less than its baseline. When the VM has accumulated credit, the VM can burst above the baseline using up to 100% of the vCPU when your application requires higher CPU performance.

25.  Leverage Tags to keep track of your resources. Easily allocated cost codes to your resources and remove them together by searching by tag.

26.  Azure Backup. When setting up Azure Backup policies, set the retention of backups to meet your requirements. Don’t set it forever just because you can.

27.  Recovery Vaults. By default, Recovery Vaults are created with GRS storage which means backups stored there are replicated to another region. If you don’t require Geo Replication, change it to LRS which replicates it 3 times in the same datacentre. This is often enough for most companies and it cost half the price.

28.  Log Analytics. Be careful with what time of events you collect. It is tempting to collect everything but as you know there is a cost associated with that collection and it is not cheap.

As you can see there are plenty of areas where savings can be achieved. If you want to have a conversation to find out how much your company can save, reach out directly or through your account manager.