Azure pricing and support

Question 1

Azure account

Answer 1

tied to a specific identity (includes name, email, billing etc)

use this to sign into azure website to administer and deploy services.

each account can be associated with one or more subscriptions

Question 2

Azure free account

Answer 2

subset of azure services free for 12 months (750 VM hours, 5GB storage, 250GB SQL DB)
$200 free credit to explore any azure service for 30 days
25+ always free services

Question 3

Azure subscription types

Answer 3

Free

Pay-as-you-go : charges you monthly for the services used in that billing period

Student : $100 azure credits to be used in 12 months, no credit card required

Question 4

Subscriptions include:

Answer 4

• billing and subscription support
• products and services documentation
• online self help docs
• community support

Question 5

Purchasing options

Answer 5

Enterprise agreement - paid annually based on negotiated amount of azure services

Web direct - pay general public pricing for azure resources. Billing takes place through Azure website

CSP - cloud solution provider, microsoft partners that companies hire to build solutions on top of Azure. Payment and billing occur through CSP

Question 6

Factors affecting cost

Answer 6

Resource type - costs are resource specific

Purchasing option - usage rates and billing periods differ between EA, direct web and CSP

Location - costs differ between location that offer services, products and resources

Question 7

Zones

Answer 7

geographical grouping of azure regions for billing purposes

Zone 1 (US, Europe, Canada, UK, France)
Zone 2 (Asia Pacific, Japan, Australia, India, Korea)
Zone 3 (Brazil)
DE Zone (Germany)

Question 8

Pricing calculator

Answer 8

free web-based tool to help estimate your needs and obtain cost estimates

Question 9

TCO calculator

Answer 9

Total cost of ownership calculator - helps to estimate cost savings realised by migrating to Azure

Question 10

Best practises for minimising azure costs

Answer 10

Spending limits (NB not available for PAYG)

Tags - use tags to group billing data

Reserved instances - Azure Reserved Instances (RI), are VMs which have been reserved on Microsoft Azure’s Public IaaS cloud for dedicated use on a one-year or three-year basis. You get discounted pricing compared to on-demand.

Question 11

Azure cost management

Answer 11

free, built-in tool to gain insights into where money is being spent. You can set budgets, schedule reports and analyse cost areas

Question 12

Support plans

Answer 12

Developer - for trial and non production environments
business hours support (email)
8 hour response time for Sev C
architecture - general guidance

Standard -
24x7 phone and email support
Sev A < 1 hour
architecture - general guidance

Professional direct 
(for companies with business critical workloads in Azure)
24x7 phone and email support
Sev A < 1 hour
architecture - best practise 
onboarding services 
engineering-led webinars 
ProDirect delivery manager 

Premier - 
(for companies with large reliance on MS products including Azure)
24x7 phone and email support
Sev A < 1 hour
architecture - customer specific 
TAM led reporting/management
engineering-led webinars 
Event management (at an extra cost)

Question 13

Support outside of support plans

Answer 13

Azure knowledge center
Developer network forums
stack overflow

Question 14

Knowledge center

Answer 14

searchable database that contains answers to common support questions

Question 15

SLAs

Answer 15

formal documents define performance standards that apply to Azure

• Microsoft’s commitments
• SLAs for individual products and services
• what happens if product or service fails to perform

No SLAs under free or shared tiers

Question 16

three characteristics of SLAs

Answer 16

1. performance targets
2. uptime and connectivity guarantees
3. service credits (% of monthly service fee credited back if service fails to meet uptime guarantee)

typical SLA performance targets range from 99.9-99.99% uptime

Question 17

Private preview

Answer 17

Azure feature available to specific Azure customers for evaluation services
Invite-only, issued by the PG

Question 18

Public preview

Answer 18

Azure feature available to all customers for evaluation purposes.

Question 19

How to access preview features

Answer 19

Go to preview features page (azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/preview)
Select the ‘try it’ button

Question 20

General availability (GA)

Answer 20

Once a feature has been tested successfully, it might be released to all customers as Azure’s default feature set

Question 21

Monitor feature updates

Answer 21

Azure portal has a ‘What’s new’ link on the help menu.

Or use azure updates - azure.microsoft.com/updates

Question 22

Azure subscriptions

Answer 22

define boundaries around azure products, services, resources.
Billing boundary - how an azure account is billed for using Azure

Access control boundary - access management at subscription level

Question 23

management groups

Answer 23

Container for managing access, policies and compliance across subscriptions

Question 24

What support does every azure subscription include?

Answer 24

free access to billing and subscription support
online documentation
community support forum