Best Practices for Cost Optimization on Azure Cloud

Today, Azure accounts for a large proportion of the IT budget for several small, medium, and large enterprises.

Inbuilt Azure Cost Optimization Options

1. Azure Reserved Instances: Three reservation options allow users to receive significant discounts on products & services.

2. Azure Hybrid Benefit: It is a program where a user can benefit from Microsoft’s large enterprise install base.

3. Azure Dev/Test Pricing: Microsoft provides heavy discounts on services if you are using them for development and testing.

4. Price Matching: Microsoft adjusts Azure’s pricing every three months to match AWS costs for comparable services.

5. Azure Cost Management: It is free, and accessible to all built-in Azure tools that allow cost analysis.

6. Using best-suited VMs: Azure cloud provides numerous different hardware with varied performance capabilities.

7. Making the most of B-series VMs: With B-series, VMs users are provided discounts ranging between 15-55% if compared to VMs with similar capacity.

8. Wielding the power of lightweight containers: Containers are lighter than VMs and thus need less space and several can be hosted on one physical host.

9. Beware of unused disks: Virtual disks are not deleted upon the deletion of a virtual machine and can put a hole in your pocket.

10. Make a move to an elastic database: In some cases, moving from traditional SQL server instances to a PaaS model such as Azure SQL service can reduce significant costs.

11. Practice storage tiering: Storage is a major part of Azure deployment costing and using storage tiering can help cut down that cost.

Read the entire blog here.