Azure Fundamentals: Describe Azure management and governance Flashcards
operational expense (OpEx)
renting infrastructure as you need it, whether it’s compute, storage, networking, and so on.
Resource type
A number of factors influence the cost of Azure resources. The type of resources, the settings for the resource, and the Azure region will all have an impact on how much a resource costs. When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates metered instances for that resource. The meters track the resources’ usage and generate a usage record that is used to calculate your bill.
Consumption
Pay-as-you-go has been a consistent theme throughout, and that’s the cloud payment model where you pay for the resources that you use during a billing cycle. If you use more compute this cycle, you pay more. If you use less in the current cycle, you pay less. It’s a straight forward pricing mechanism that allows for maximum flexibility.
Maintenance
The flexibility of the cloud makes it possible to rapidly adjust resources based on demand. Using resource groups can help keep all of your resources organized. In order to control costs, it’s important to maintain your cloud environment. For example, every time you provision a VM, additional resources such as storage and networking are also provisioned. If you deprovision the VM, those additional resources may not deprovision at the same time, either intentionally or unintentionally. By keeping an eye on your resources and making sure you’re not keeping around resources that are no longer needed, you can help control cloud costs.
Geography
When you provision most resources in Azure, you need to define a region where the resource deploys. Azure infrastructure is distributed globally, which enables you to deploy your services centrally or closest to your customers, or something in between. With this global deployment comes global pricing differences. The cost of power, labor, taxes, and fees vary depending on the location. Due to these variations, Azure resources can differ in costs to deploy depending on the region.
Network traffic is also impacted based on geography. For example, it’s less expensive to move information within Europe than to move information from Europe to Asia or South America.
Network Traffic
Billing zones are a factor in determining the cost of some Azure services.
Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure datacenters. Some inbound data transfers (data going into Azure datacenters) are free. For outbound data transfers (data leaving Azure datacenters), data transfer pricing is based on zones.
A zone is a geographical grouping of Azure regions for billing purposes. The bandwidth pricing page has additional information on pricing for data ingress, egress, and transfer.
Subscription type
Some Azure subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs.
For example, an Azure free trial subscription provides access to a number of Azure products that are free for 12 months. It also includes credit to spend within your first 30 days of sign-up. You’ll get access to more than 25 products that are always free (based on resource and region availability).
Azure Marketplace
Azure Marketplace lets you purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors. This could be a server with software preinstalled and configured, or managed network firewall appliances, or connectors to third-party backup services. When you purchase products through Azure Marketplace, you may pay for not only the Azure services that you’re using, but also the services or expertise of the third-party vendor. Billing structures are set by the vendor.
All solutions available in Azure Marketplace are certified and compliant with Azure policies and standards. The certification policies may vary based on the service or solution type and Azure service involved.
Pricing calculator
The pricing calculator is designed to give you an estimated cost for provisioning resources in Azure. You can get an estimate for individual resources, build out a solution, or use an example scenario to see an estimate of the Azure spend. The pricing calculator’s focus is on the cost of provisioned resources in Azure.
The Pricing calculator is for information purposes only. The prices are only an estimate. Nothing is provisioned when you add resources to the pricing calculator, and you won’t be charged for any services you select.
With the pricing calculator, you can estimate the cost of any provisioned resources, including compute, storage, and associated network costs. You can even account for different storage options like storage type, access tier, and redundancy.
TCO calculator
The TCO calculator is designed to help you compare the costs for running an on-premises infrastructure compared to an Azure Cloud infrastructure. With the TCO calculator, you enter your current infrastructure configuration, including servers, databases, storage, and outbound network traffic. The TCO calculator then compares the anticipated costs for your current environment with an Azure environment supporting the same infrastructure requirements.
With the TCO calculator, you enter your configuration, add in assumptions like power and IT labor costs, and are presented with an estimation of the cost difference to run the same environment in your current datacenter or in Azure.
What is Cost Management?
Cost Management provides the ability to quickly check Azure resource costs, create alerts based on resource spend, and create budgets that can be used to automate management of resources.
Cost analysis is a subset of Cost Management that provides a quick visual for your Azure costs. Using cost analysis, you can quickly view the total cost in a variety of different ways, including by billing cycle, region, resource, and so on.
You use cost analysis to explore and analyze your organizational costs. You can view aggregated costs by organization to understand where costs are accrued and to identify spending trends. And you can see accumulated costs over time to estimate monthly, quarterly, or even yearly cost trends against a budget.
Cost alerts
Cost alerts provide a single location to quickly check on all of the different alert types that may show up in the Cost Management service. The three types of alerts that may show up are:
Budget alerts
Credit alerts
Department spending quota alerts.
Budget alerts
Budget alerts notify you when spending, based on usage or cost, reaches or exceeds the amount defined in the alert condition of the budget. Cost Management budgets are created using the Azure portal or the Azure Consumption API.
In the Azure portal, budgets are defined by cost. Budgets are defined by cost or by consumption usage when using the Azure Consumption API. Budget alerts support both cost-based and usage-based budgets. Budget alerts are generated automatically whenever the budget alert conditions are met. You can view all cost alerts in the Azure portal. Whenever an alert is generated, it appears in cost alerts. An alert email is also sent to the people in the alert recipients list of the budget.
Credit alerts
Credit alerts notify you when your Azure credit monetary commitments are consumed. Monetary commitments are for organizations with Enterprise Agreements (EAs). Credit alerts are generated automatically at 90% and at 100% of your Azure credit balance. Whenever an alert is generated, it’s reflected in cost alerts, and in the email sent to the account owners.
Department spending quota alerts
Department spending quota alerts notify you when department spending reaches a fixed threshold of the quota. Spending quotas are configured in the EA portal. Whenever a threshold is met, it generates an email to department owners, and appears in cost alerts. For example, 50 percent or 75 percent of the quota.
