Azure Pricing, Service Level Agreements, and Lifecycles Flashcards
Describe an Azure Subscription
A subscription is a billing unit. Users have access to one or more subscriptions, with different roles. All resources consumed by a subscription will be billed to an owner. You can create multiple subscriptions which can be used to organise resources into completely distinct accounts.
Describe subscription management using Management groups
A way of creating a hierarchy of subscriptions
Subscriptions > management group > root group
Describe options for purchasing Azure products and services
- Pay as you go Subscription
Credit card charge monthly, retail price, can set a limit - Enterprise Agreement
Negotiated minimum spend for a large company
Annual basis
Custom prices - Purchase from a Microsoft Partner (e.g. HP, Dell, something like that)
Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)
Describe options around Azure free account
Azure Free Account
available to all, given an offer of roughly $200 USD for 30 days credit
12 months of free services (some VM, some storage)
Some services are always free
Factors affecting costs
Different services are billed based on different factors
- Free services (up to 50 virtual networks, basic load balancer and AD, NSG, web apps…)
- Pay per usage (consumption model)
e.g. cost saving: Azure Functions, 1 million executions free per month vs cheapest virtual machine is $20-100 per month
Functions, Logic Apps, Storage (per GB), API calls, outbound bandwith
- Pay for time (per second)
Per second billing stops when the VM is stopped
How would you obtain stability in pricing
pay a fixed price per month for computing power or storage capacity
whether you use it or not
Discounts for 1-year or 3-year commitment in VM (reserved instances)
Multi-tenant or isolated environment options impact cost
Do you pay for bandwidth in cloud environments?
The first 5GB is free in outbound requirements.
Any Inbound data is free, bandwidth costs vary per billing Zones
The consequence is exporting large amounts of data out of azure will cost ($52k for 1 PB)
Describe Zones for billing purposes
a zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes
Zone 1: US, EU, Canada UK, France
Zone 2: Asia Pacific, Japan, Australia, India Korea
Zone 3: Brazil
DE Zone 1: Germany Central, Germany Northeast
Describe the Pricing Calculator, what factors will impact the result?
Estimates the cost, but they are not 100% accurate. Configurable options: region, pricing tier, subscription type, support options, Dev/Test Pricing
Estimates can be exported (csv.) and shared
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator
The cost of a server is more than just the cost of the hardware.
Other costs include: Electricity, cooling, internet connectivity, rack space, setup labor, maintenance labor, backup
Can be used to compare cost of cloud server to on-prem
Best practices for minimizing Azure costs
Azure Advisor cost tab - makes recommendations to identify resources that are not being used
Auto shutdown on dev/qa resources - to ensure resources arent running when people arent using them i.e. night/weekend
Utilize cool/archive storage where possible. (10% of the price of hot storage)
Use reserved instances for VMs (commit for 1, 3 year periods for your VMs, you can also use hybrid licencing to further reduce cost)
Configure alerts when billing exceeds an expected level
Use Policy to restrict access to certain expensive resources
Auto-scaling resources
Downsize when resources are over-provisioned
Ensure every resource has an owner (tags)
Azure cost management
Another free tool within azure that allows you to analyse historical spending.
Tracking against budgets
Schedule and automatically send reports
Levels of Azure Support
Basic - free and included in all plans Developer - non-production environments Standard- production environments Professional Direct - business-critical Premier - multiple products, including Azure
Features of Basic Support Plan
Self-help support Documentation Azure Advisor recommendations Service Health dashboard and Health API You can open a ticket if you think there is a problem with the environment but you don't get support for problems that are specific to you
Features of Developer Support Plan
Business hours access to support engineers via email
Unlimited contacts/cases
Sev C (Severity level C) Non-business critical tickets can be opened and you get 1 day (<8h) response time
General architectural guidance
$29 per month
Features of Standard Support Plant
24x7 access to support engineers by phone an email
Unlimited contacts/cases
Severity support levels Sev C (<8 h), Sev B (< 4h), Sev CA (<1 h)
General architectural guidance
$100 month
Features of Professional Direct support
24x7 access to support engineers by phone an email
Unlimited contacts/cases
Severity support levels Sev C (<8 h), Sev B (< 4h), Sev CA (<1 h)
Architectural guidance on best practices
onboarding and consultations
Delivery Manager
$1000/month
Features of Premier Support
As professional direct support.
But can give specific architectural support such as design reviews, performance tuning etc.
Technical account manager, including service reviews, reports
training provided on demand
“price on request”
What info is provided by the Knowledge Center?
answers to common questions
Describe Service level agreement (SLA)
Azure provides SLA for many of its products. It is a financial agreement that the advertised service will work.
e.g. for VMs with 2+ instances across 2+ AZ in the same Azure region, connectivity is guaranteed 99.99% of the time. if the guarantee is not made then you receive 10% rebate on your bill
describe composite SLAs
When you have composite SLAs - multiply together the availability.
To improve this, introduce the redundancy in the SLA with the lowest availability.
What are Preview features used for?
Preview features are for “testing” and not production use.
There is no guarantee that a Preview feature will actually go live, and they could change significantly.
Public vs Private preview?
Public preview is available to everyone and you can look at the service. Private preview requires registration,, you sign up and MS may or may select you to test.
General Availability (GA)
After Public preview, a product or service will go live and move to General Availability (GA)
That means you can rely on it, use it for production applications with real production data - this is the go-live moment.
What would be a good reason to have multiple Azure subscriptions?
- To seperate out billing of resources among several payers
- to clearly separate resources between different teams and departments
- for an additional form of security to separate out development servers from production
