Describe Cost Management in Azure

Question 1

What factors affect OpEx costs?

Answer 1

• resource type
  -consumption
  -maintenance
  -geography
  -subscription type
  -azure marketplace

Question 2

How does resource type affect costs?

Answer 2

• resource type, settings for the resource (OS, cores etc) and the region the resource is in all affect its costs
  -when a resource is created azure created metered instances for that resource
  -the meters track the usage and generate a usage record that is used to calculate bill

Question 3

How does consumption affect costs?

Answer 3

• PAYG model
• azure also offers ability to commit to using a set amount of resource in advance and receive discounts on those reserved resources
• DBs, compute and storage all provide this option
• usually commit for around 3 years and can combine with backup of PAYG if you see a sudden demand surge
• savings can be up to 72%

Question 4

How does maintenance affect costs?

Answer 4

• in order to control costs its important to maintain your cloud environment
• make sure resources are not being kept longer than required

Question 5

how does geography affect costs?

Answer 5

• cost of power, labor and fees vary depending on location
• therefore so do costs per region
• also network traffic is less expensive within certain regions

Question 6

what is the pricing calculator?

Answer 6

• designed to give an estimated cost for provisioning resources in azure
• can get estimate for individual resources, build out a solution or use an example scenario to see an estimate of azure spend
• focus is on cost of provisioned resources

Question 7

what is the total cost of ownership calculator?

Answer 7

-TCO is designed to help compare the costs for running on-prem infrastructure compared to azure infrastructure
- can enter the current infrastructure and then compare it to the anticipated costs for similar azure environment

Question 8

what is azure cost management?

Answer 8

• provides 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

Question 9

what cost alerts are available to you in azure?

Answer 9

• budget alerts; notify you when spending reaches or exceeded amount defined in alert condition of budget. Budgets can be cost or usage based
  -credit alerts; notify you when azure credit monetary commitments are confused
  -department spending quota alerts; notify you when department spending reaches a fixed threshold of the quot

Question 10

what is a budget?

Answer 10

• spending limit for azure
• can be based on subscription, resource group, service type or other criteria

Question 11

what are azure tags?

Answer 11

• helps you to organise related resources and provide extra information or metadata about the resources
• tags applied to resource groups are not inherited by resourced within them

Question 12

why are azure tags useful?

Answer 12

• resource management
• cost management and efficiency
• operations management
• security; can organise data by security level such as public or confidential
• governance and regulatory compliance
• workload optimisation and automation

Question 13

how can we manange azure tags?

Answer 13

• can use powershell, azure cli or azure portal
• you can use azure policy to enforce tagging rules