Part 6: Cost management and SLA Flashcards
Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
The TCO Calculator helps you estimate the cost savings of operating your solution on Azure over time, instead of in your on-premises datacenter.
Workloads
Servers
Databases
Storage
Networking
Costs
Costs have been certified by Nucleus Research, an independent research company. For example, these costs include:
Electricity price per kilowatt hour (KWh).
Hourly pay rate for IT administration.
Network maintenance cost as a percentage of network hardware and software costs.
Subscription types
Free trial
A free trial subscription provides you with 12 months of popular free services, a credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and more than 25 services that are always free. Your Azure services are disabled when the trial ends or when your credit expires for paid products, unless you upgrade to a paid subscription.
Pay-as-you-go
A pay-as-you-go subscription enables you to pay for what you use by attaching a credit or debit card to your account. Organizations can apply for volume discounts and prepaid invoicing.
Member offers
Your existing membership to certain Microsoft products and services might provide you with credits for your Azure account and reduced rates on Azure services. For example, member offers are available to Visual Studio subscribers, Microsoft Partner Network members, Microsoft for Startups members, and Microsoft Imagine members.
How to purchase Azure services
Through an Enterprise Agreement
Larger customers, known as enterprise customers, can sign an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft. This agreement commits them to spending a predetermined amount on Azure services over a period of three years. The service fee is typically paid annually. As an Enterprise Agreement customer, you’ll receive the best customized pricing based on the kinds and amounts of services you plan on using.
Directly from the web
Here, you purchase Azure services directly from the Azure portal website and pay standard prices. You’re billed monthly, as a credit card payment or through an invoice. This purchasing method is known as Web Direct.
Through a Cloud Solution Provider
A Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is a Microsoft Partner who helps you build solutions on top of Azure. Your CSP bills you for your Azure usage at a price they determine. They also answer your support questions and escalate them to Microsoft, as needed.
What factors affect costs?
Resource type
Resource usage
Usage meters
When you provision a resource, Azure creates meters to track usage of that resource.
Subscription type
Marketplace purchases
Location / Billing zone
Azure Pricing Calculator
Options
Region
Tier
Billing options
Support options
Programs and offers
Azure Dev/Test pricing
Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor identifies unused or underutilized resources and recommends unused resources that you can remove.
Limit costs: Spending limits
If you have a free trial or a credit-based Azure subscription, you can use spending limits to prevent accidental overrun.
A related concept is quotas, or limits on the number of similar resources you can provision within your subscription. For example, you can allocate up to 25,000 VMs per region.
Limit costs: Azure Reservations
Azure Reservations offers discounted prices on certain Azure services. Azure Reservations can save you up to 72 percent as compared to pay-as-you-go prices. To receive a discount, you reserve services and resources by paying in advance.
Limit costs: Choose low-cost locations and regions
But remember, some resources are metered and billed according to how much outgoing (egress) network bandwidth they consume.
Limit costs: Research available cost-saving offers
Keep up to date with the latest Azure customer and subscription offers, and switch to offers that provide the greatest cost-saving benefit.
Limit costs: Use Azure Cost Management + Billing
Reporting
Data enrichment
Budgets
Alerting
Recommendations
Tags
Tags help you manage costs associated with the different groups of Azure products and resources. You can apply tags to groups of Azure resources to organize billing data.
Limit costs (1)
Use spending limits to restrict your spending
Use Azure Reservations to prepay
Choose low-cost locations and regions
Research available cost-saving offers
Use Azure Cost Management + Billing
Apply tags to identify cost owners
Limit costs (2)
Resize underutilized virtual machines
Deallocate virtual machines during off hours
Delete unused resources
Migrate from IaaS to PaaS services
Save on licensing costs
Choose cost-effective operating systems
Use Azure Hybrid Benefit to repurpose software licenses on Azure
SLA
A service-level agreement (SLA) is a formal agreement between a service company and the customer. For Azure, this agreement defines the performance standards that Microsoft commits to for you, the customer.
Introduction
General terms
SLA details
Downtime examples
99
1.68 hours per week
99.9
10.1 minutes per week
99.95
5 minuts per week
99.99
1.01 minutes per week
99.999
6 seconds per week
Service credits
A service credit is the percentage of the fees you paid that are credited back to you according to the claim approval process.
How do I know when there’s an outage?
Azure status provides a global view of the health of Azure services and regions.
How can I request a service credit from Microsoft?
Typically, you need to file a claim with Microsoft to receive a service credit. If you purchase Azure services from a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, your CSP typically manages the claims process.
Application SLA
An application SLA defines the SLA requirements for a specific application. This term typically refers to an application that you build on Azure.
Business impact
Effect on other business operations
Usage patterns
Composite SLA’s
Multiply percentages
99.9% x 99.9% x 99.99% x 99.99% = 99.78%
What if SLA not enough?
Choose customization options that fit your required SLA
Build availability requirements into your design
Include redundancy to increase availability
