Describe cost management in Azure Flashcards
Cost Affecting Factors
Base Cost:
-Resource Types – All Azure services (resources) have resource-specific pricing models. -Typically consisting of one or more metrics.
-Services – Azure specific offers (Enterprise, Web Direct, CSP, etc.) have different cost and billing components like prepaids, billing cycles, - discounts, etc.
-Location – running Azure services vary between Azure regions
-Bandwidth – network traffic when uploading (inbound/ingress) data to Azure or downloading (outbound/egress) from Azure
Savings:
-Reserved Instances
-Hybrid Benefits
Azure Reservations
Purchase Azure services for 1 or 3 years in advance with a significant discounts:
Reserved instances – Azure Virtual Machines
Reserved capacity – Azure Storage, SQL Database vCores, Databricks DBUs, Cosmos DB RUs
Software plans – Red Hat, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Linux, etc.
Reservations are made for 1 or 3 years
Azure Spot VMs
Purchase unused Virtual Machine capacity for significant discount:
How it works:
-Significant dicount for Azure VMs
-Capacity can be taken away at any time
-Customer can set maximum price after discount to keep or evict the machine
-Best for interruptable workloads (batch processing, dev/test environments, large compute workloads, non-critical tasks, etc.)
Azure Dedicated Host
Azure Dedicated Host provides physical servers that host one or more Azure virtual machines.
-Your server is dedicated to your organization and workloads—capacity isn’t shared with other customers.
-This host-level isolation helps address compliance requirements.
Azure Hybrid Use Benefits
Use existing licenses in the Azure:
Windows Server
-Azure VM
RedHat:
-Azure VM
SUSE Linux:
-Azure VM
SQL Server:
-Azure SQL Database
-Azure SQL Managed Instance
-Azure SQL Server on VM
-Azure Data Factory SQL Server Integration Services
Azure Cost Tools
Pricing calculator – estimate the cost of Azure services:
-Select service
-Adjust parameters (usage)
-View the price
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator – estimate and compare the cost of running workloads in datacenter versus Azure:
-Define your workloads
-Adjust assumptions
-View the report
Azure Cost Management
-A centralized service for reporting usage and billing of Azure environment
-Self-service cost exploration capabilities
-Budgets & alerts
-Cost recommendations
-Automated exports
Minimizing Costs in Azure
1-Azure Pricing Calculator to choose the low-cost region
-Good latency
-All required services are available
-Data sovereignty/compliance requirements
2-Hybrid use benefit and Azure Reservations
3-Azure Cost Management monitoring, budgets, alerts and recommendations
4-Understand service lifecycle and automate environments
5-Use autoscaling features to your advantage
6-Azure Monitor to find and scale down underutilized resources
7-Use tags & policies for effective governance
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
-Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal agreement between a service provider and a customer.
-SLA is a promise of a service’s availability (uptime & connectivity). Availability is a measure of time that a service remains operational.
-Each Service has its own SLA
-Ranges from 99% to 99.999%
-Free services typically don’t have an SLA
-Broken SLA means service credit return (discount)
SLAs Formulas
Logical AND - adding dependency
Availability of S1 AND S2 = Availability(S1) * Availability(S2)
Scenario - Azure website with SQL backend db
-Availability = Availability(web) app * Availability(sql)
-Availability = 99.95% * 99.95%
-Availability = 0.9995 * 0.9995
-Availability = 0.99900025
-Availability ~ 99.9%
Logical OR - adding redundancy
Availability of S1 OR S2 = 100% - ( Unvailability(S1) * Unvailability(S2) )
Scenario - Two redundant web apps behind a load balancer
-Availability(both-web) = 100% - ( Unvailability(web1) * Unvailability(web2) )
-Availability(both-web) = 100% - ( 0.05% * 0.05% )
-Availability(both-web) = 1 – ( 0.0005 * 0.0005 )
-Availability(both-web) = 1 – 0.00000025
-Availability(both-web) = 0.99999975
-Availability(both-web) ~ 99.9999%
SLAs Key Items
-Formal agreement between Microsoft & the customer
-Calculated as a percentage of service availability (uptime & connetivity) (a promise)
-Breaking the SLA provides a discount from the final monthly bill (Service Credit)
-Higher tier services offer better SLAs
-Free services typically have no SLA (0% SLA)
-Preview services have no SLA
-Composite SLA is a combined SLA of all application components
Service Lifecycle
-Every service in Azure follows its own service lifecycle
-Public preview is a ‘beta’ stage of the service available to general public use
-Features can also be in preview stages
-Designed for testing, not production solutions
-General availability is a ‘production’ release of the serviceService Lifecycle
Public Preview Key Info
-No SLA
-Some services have no support coverage
-Limited region availability
-Limited functionality
-Pricing changes
-Direction changes
-Azure Portal Previews (https://preview.portal.azure.com)
Azure Resource Tags
-Tags are simple Name (key) - Value pairs
-Designed to help with organization of Azure resources
-Used for resource governance, security, operations management, cost management, automation, etc.
Typical tagging strategies:
-Functional – mark by function ( ex: environment = production )
-Classification – mark by policies used ( ex: classification = restricted )
-Finance/Accounting – mark for billing purposes ( ex: department = finance )
-Partnership – mark by association of users/groups ( ex: owner = adam )
-Applicable for resources, resource groups and subscriptions
-NOT inherited by default
