9 Tips to reduce the Azure IaaS VMs cost

1. Pick the right Azure VM size and series family

To make it easier to pick the right size, Azure offers you different type or also called VM series. You can find a broad set of different virtual machine types in Azure, which give you a choice depending on your use cases, scenarios, and application needs. From general-purpose VMs, compute, memory or storage optimized, VMs with GPUs, and HPC workloads. You can find some documentation on the different VM types and sizes here.

2. Run them when you need them, shut them off when you don’t

Another great benefit of Cloud Computing compare to traditional on-prem are the Pay-per-use options. If you don’t need a virtual machine, you can shut it down, and you are only paying for the existing storage, but not for the computing power anymore. This helps you with workloads, which will need to scale up and down using virtual machines. Or simply with virtual machines in test/dev environments or labs, which don’t need to run 100 percent of the time.

3. Commit and use Azure Reserved VM instances

Now, I know that shutting down virtual machines is excellent in theory if you have the right workloads and applications running in these virtual machines. However, what about the virtual machines which need to run 24h 365 days a year. For that, Microsoft has something called Azure Reservations, and if you are thinking specifically about Azure IaaS VMs, it is called Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs). Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances can help you save money by pre-paying for one-year or three-years of virtual machines. Pre-paying allows you to get a discount on the resources you use.

4. Using Economical burstable VMs

B-series are economical virtual machines that provide a low-cost option for workloads that typically run at a low to moderate baseline CPU utilization, but sometimes need to burst to significantly higher CPU utilization when the demand rises. If you want to know more about B-series Azure VMs, check out the following Microsoft Docs.

5. Azure Spot Virtual Machines for batch processing jobs

With Azure Spot Virtual Machines (Spot VMs), you’ll be able to access unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts, up to 90 percent compared to pay-as-you-go prices. Spot VMs are ideal for workloads that can be interrupted, providing scalability while reducing costs. Using Spot VMs allows you to take advantage of our unused capacity at a significant cost saving. At any point in time when Azure needs the capacity back, the Azure infrastructure will evict Spot VMs. Therefore, Spot VMs are great for workloads that can handle interruptions like batch processing jobs, dev/test environments, large compute workloads and more. You get unique Azure pricing and benefits when running Windows Server workloads on Spot VMs. Spot VMs are currently in preview and you can find more about them on Microsoft Docs.

6. Leverage the Azure Hybrid Benefit

If you already have existing Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises licenses with Software Assurance, you can use them for Azure virtual machines (VMs). This will allow you to save the Pay-as-you-go cost for Windows Server and SQL Server licenses. The Azure Hybrid Benefit applies not only to Azure VMs but also on Azure SQL Database PaaS services and the Azure Dedicated Host. If you want to know more about how to take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit, check out the Microsoft Azure Docs page.

7. Cost Management to Analyse your Spendings

With Azure Cost Management, you can monitor your cloud spending by tracking resource usage and manage costs across all your clouds with a single unified view. It also helps to analyze and optimize your cloud spendings and cloud efficiency. It gives you a transparent view across your organization and helps you to identify resources to optimize.

8. Reduce the Costs of your Azure IaaS VMs using Azure Advisor

Azure Advisor is a personalized cloud consultant that helps you follow best practices to optimize your Azure deployments. It analyzes your resource configuration and usage data to recommend solutions that can help you improve the performance, high availability, security, but also the cost-effectiveness of your Azure resources. It will recommend you to right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines, buy virtual machines reserved instances to save money over pay-as-you.go costs and much more. If you want to know more about Azure Advisor, you can check out the Microsoft Docs.

9. Move services to PaaS and SaaS

This is obvious to many of you, but by analyzing your workloads running inside your virtual machines, you will find specific workloads that can be modernized to run on Azure Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services or even migrate into a Software-as-a-service solution.

This article sourced content from MVP Thomas Maurer's blog.

Thanks!