Part 6: Cost management and SLA

Question 1

Total Cost of Ownership Calculator

Answer 1

The TCO Calculator helps you estimate the cost savings of operating your solution on Azure over time, instead of in your on-premises datacenter.

Question 2

Workloads

Answer 2

Servers

Databases

Storage

Networking

Question 3

Costs

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Subscription types

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

How to purchase Azure services

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

What factors affect costs?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Azure Pricing Calculator

Answer 7

Options

Region

Tier

Billing options

Support options

Programs and offers

Azure Dev/Test pricing

Question 7

Azure Advisor

Answer 7

Azure Advisor identifies unused or underutilized resources and recommends unused resources that you can remove.

Question 8

Limit costs: Spending limits

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

Limit costs: Azure Reservations

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Limit costs: Choose low-cost locations and regions

Answer 10

But remember, some resources are metered and billed according to how much outgoing (egress) network bandwidth they consume.

Question 11

Limit costs: Research available cost-saving offers

Answer 11

Keep up to date with the latest Azure customer and subscription offers, and switch to offers that provide the greatest cost-saving benefit.

Question 12

Limit costs: Use Azure Cost Management + Billing

Answer 12

Reporting

Data enrichment

Budgets

Alerting

Recommendations

Question 13

Tags

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Limit costs (1)

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Limit costs (2)

Answer 15

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

Question 16

SLA

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Downtime examples

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Service credits

Answer 18

A service credit is the percentage of the fees you paid that are credited back to you according to the claim approval process.

Question 19

How do I know when there’s an outage?

Answer 19

Azure status provides a global view of the health of Azure services and regions.

Question 20

How can I request a service credit from Microsoft?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Application SLA

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Composite SLA’s

Answer 22

Multiply percentages

99.9% x 99.9% x 99.99% x 99.99% = 99.78%

Question 23

What if SLA not enough?

Answer 23

Choose customization options that fit your required SLA

Build availability requirements into your design

Include redundancy to increase availability

Question 24

Preview services lifecycle

Answer 24

Development

Preview

General Availability

Although you can use an Azure preview feature in production, make sure you’re aware of any limitations around its use before you deploy it to production.

Question 25

How can I access preview features for the Azure portal?

Answer 25

You can access preview features that are specific to the Azure portal from Microsoft Azure (Preview)

Question 26

How can I stay updated on the latest announcements?

Answer 26

The Azure updates page provides information about the latest updates to Azure products, services, and features, as well as product roadmaps and announcements.