Pricing and Support

Question 1

What are subscriptions?

Answer 1

Every resource on Azure lives in a subscription. You can have multiple subscriptions within a single account to help you organise departments. Billing cycles are monthly and require repayment in 30 or 60 days
You will have a billing admin role (1 or more user) to manage everything to do with billing. Ensure separation of responsibility to ensure other users cannot see invoicing information

Question 2

What is a subscription offer type

Answer 2

Type of subscription, and there are many

Question 3

What are management groups

Answer 3

Group subscription to take actions across subscriptions in bulk to manage policies, acces and compliance. It is not a billing entity. Useful if you organisation has many subscriptions
Organise: manage access, policies and compliance in bulk (have a management group per country or department
Billing logic can still be implemented to make sure the right departments pay but management is simplified. You can also nest management groups to indicate hierarchy and relationships

Question 4

What is included in Azures Free Account?

Answer 4

1) Free
2) Include many benefits, 12 month free access, 750 hours of compute access,5GB storage, 250 GB SQL db space, 5GB on Cosmos etc
3) Always free services such has event grid, load balancers and advisory services
4) You will need a valid credit card to sign up
5) Can only get one free account per MS account

Question 5

What is Azure Cost Management

Answer 5

Dashboard to visualise spending and keep track:

1) Access from within the Azure portal. Get detailed view of current and projected costs. Azure cost management is free and included with all azure subscriptions
2) Reports and recommendations: get details spending reports and recommendation’s on how to save on costs and analyze them
3) Optimisation: optimise your current resources to save money and monitor any amazon web services charges too (for multi cloud set up)

Question 6

What influences pricing?

Answer 6

1) Resource size: a more powerful VM will cost more etc
2) Resource type: big difference in amount of hardware resources needed for various resources and complexity
3) Location: different azure locations have different prices for services. Excange rates, labor costs and more have an influence on price
4) Bandwidth: the bandwidth your services are using incurs costs (data coming in or out)

Question 7

What affects bandwidth costs

Answer 7

Azure has 3 billing zones which include many regions

1) Transfer between regions in the same zone (ingress =data in) is free
2) Transfer between regions in different zones (egress = data out) is not free

Question 8

What is the pricing calculator?

Answer 8

Estimates costs for any scenario you can think of, giving you a monthly cost estimate.

1) Add the azure service, complete with features that affect pricing.
2) Select resource properties
3) Export estimates for further analysis and proposals

Question 9

What is the TCO Calculator

Answer 9

Get an estimate of the total savings you could get for moving your on prem services to Azure

1) Estimate total saving over a period of time
2) Comprehensive reports to share with stakeholders

Question 10

What are some pricing best practices?

Answer 10

1) Spending limits
2) Quotas
3) Tags
4) Pay as you go
5) Advisor

Question 11

What are spending limits?

Answer 11

Default limit: Some azure accounts with monthly credits to use will have default spending limits applied by default. When the credits are used, the limit kicks in to prevent use of resources incurring a cost
No increase: you cant increase the spending limit so a certain amount over the credits. When the credits run out, you either have to remove the limit entirely or leave it in effect for the billing period
Pay as you go has no spending limit functionality

Question 12

What are quotas?

Answer 12

Property limit: a quota is a limit on a certain property of an azure service, for example a max of 100 namespaces for event hub per subscription
Ensure service level to ensure azure can maintain high service level
Quota change: if you need to increase the quote for a particular service, you can ask MS to increase them but you will pay more

Question 13

What are tags

Answer 13

Simple way to manage where a resource belongs
They are non functional, and attach to a resource or resource group
You can name them what you want and use as many as you want

Question 14

What are the benefits of Tags

Answer 14

1) Identify roles: protect sensitive data by defining which roles can access a resource
2) Related resources: to make bulk processing and updating easier, define which resources are related
3) Filter: filter resources per project, customer or for reporting purposes
4) Unambiguous: create a list for tags used that include: description, tag name (department/project) and potential values

Question 15

What is Pay As You Go plan?

Answer 15

One of the most expensive options as you pay a premium for the no contract
Reserved instances can save you a lot of cash. Come in 1 or 3 year contracts. Not all services can be reserved, but VMs can

Question 16

What is Advisor?

Answer 16

Has cost optimisation section

Advisor portal gives you best practices advice in general recommendations

Question 17

How are azure subscriptions related to pricing?

Answer 17

The billing of each service in your account is within a single subscription

Question 18

What features are in Azure Cost Management?

Answer 18

Visualise future and current costs for your azure account

Question 19

What are the 5 Support plans?

Answer 19

Basic
Developer
Standard
Professional Direct
Premier

Question 20

What does the basic and all support plans include?

Answer 20

1) 24/7 access to billing and subscription support
2) Online self help (docs and white papers)
3) Forms to connect with other Azure users
4) Azure advisor: best practice recommendations
5) Service health: assess current issues and future planned maintenance

Question 21

What does developer support plan offer

Answer 21

Technical support: Business hours, email
Support cases: unlimited
Azure configuration: guidance and troubleshooting
Response time: Sev C <8 Hours
Architecture support: general guidance
Operations support: NA
Training: NA

Question 22

What does standard support plan offer

Answer 22

Technical support: 24/7, email, phone
Support cases: unlimited
Azure configuration: guidance and troubleshooting
Response time: Sev C <8 Hours, Sev B <4 hours, Sev A <1 hour
Architecture support: general guidance
Operations support: NA
Training: NA

Question 23

What does professional direct support plan offer

Answer 23

Technical support: 24/7, email, phone
Support cases: unlimited
Azure configuration: guidance and troubleshooting
Response time: Sev C <4 Hours, Sev B <2 hours, Sev A <1 hour
Architecture support: arch guidance
Operations support: onboarding, reviews
Training: webinars

Question 24

What does premier support plan offer

Answer 24

Technical support: 24/7, email, phone
Support cases: unlimited
Azure configuration: guidance and troubleshooting
Response time: Sev C <4 Hours, Sev B <2 hours, Sev A <1 hour
Architecture support: customer specific guidance
Operations support: tech reviews, reporting, tech account mng
Training: on demand

Question 25

What are tickets

Answer 25

Enquiries you make to support. Is a unique identifier and a single reference to an issue. Made through the Azure portal. Can have 1 of 4 ticket types:
1) Billing
2) Service and subscription limits (quotas)
3) Subscription management
4) Technical
Request will be processed according to support plan. Free support only allowed you to raise tickets for subscription and billing

Question 26

What are channels?

Answer 26

More channels to get help and support on Azure:

1) Azure documentation: collection of thousand of product and services written by people that make the product and community contributes
2) Forums: suits everyone from beginners to experts. Ask questions, answer, and search for past knowledge being shared
3) Social media: direct support from azure and the teams behind each service. Ask microsoft experts and community heroes via Social media aswell

Question 27

What is Knowledge center?

Answer 27

May have a lot of basic questions when you first start out, however a lot of these will be common to others. The knowledge center aims to answer these

1) No new questions: you cant add a new question or add to an exiting
2) You can search by category product and free texts
3) Use other channels if you cant find the answer!

Question 28

What is a Service Level Agreement?

Answer 28

Is a contract between a service provider and a client, agreeing on a certain level of service e.g. contract between you and azure stating commitment to uptime and connectivity, and then claim compensation

1) You pay for an SLA to ensure the least possible downtime, alike an insurance policy!
2) Confidence: critical to ensure confidence in up time and reliability
3) Multiple SLAs: Generally one per product. You automatically use the SLA for the service you use
4) Complex: SLAs can have various levels depending on the number and variety of services, which region you use and much more
5) Mandatory: If you have an azure account, the various SLAs apply. No SLAs for free products and services

Question 29

What is a Service Lifecycle?

Answer 29

When services are developed, customers can provide valuable feedback before everything is finalised. 3 main stages
1) Private preview: only available to specific customers invited by the product team behind the service
2) Public preview: available to all customers for available. Enable preview features via the azure portal
3) General Availability: Available to all Azure customers as a normal service, including SLA. Services become generally available when they are ready. Can be a gradual rollout to some regions first
You can monitor the Azure update feed to watch for previews, new features and updates

Question 30

What are subscription limits

Answer 30

Subscriptions are bound to some hard limitations. For example, the maximum number of Express Route circuits per subscription is 10. Those limits should be considered as you create subscriptions on your account. If there is a need to go over those limits in particular scenarios, then you might need additional subscriptions.

Question 31

How can you organise multiple subscriptions

Answer 31

If you have multiple subscriptions, you can organize them into invoice sections. Each invoice section is a line item on the invoice that shows the charges incurred that month.or example, you might need a single invoice for your organization but want to organize charges by department, team, or project.

Depending on your needs, you can set up multiple invoices within the same billing account. To do this, create additional billing profiles. Each billing profile has its own monthly invoice and payment method.

Question 32

How do you merge two Pay As You Go subscriptions?

Answer 32

Contact Azure support

Question 33

What does General Availability mean

Answer 33

The last stage in the service lifecyle

Question 34

How do you monitor for feature updates and product changes

Answer 34

You can monitor the Azure update feed to watch for previews, new features and updates

Question 35

How do you transfer billing ownership?

Answer 35

Via cost management and billing in the portal

Question 36

How do you change your subscription offer type?

Answer 36

TBC