Pricing and Support Flashcards
What are subscriptions?
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
What is a subscription offer type
Type of subscription, and there are many
What are management groups
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
What is included in Azures Free Account?
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
What is Azure Cost Management
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)
What influences pricing?
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)
What affects bandwidth costs
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
What is the pricing calculator?
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
What is the TCO Calculator
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
What are some pricing best practices?
1) Spending limits
2) Quotas
3) Tags
4) Pay as you go
5) Advisor
What are spending limits?
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
What are quotas?
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
What are tags
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
What are the benefits of Tags
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
What is Pay As You Go plan?
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
What is Advisor?
Has cost optimisation section
Advisor portal gives you best practices advice in general recommendations
How are azure subscriptions related to pricing?
The billing of each service in your account is within a single subscription
What features are in Azure Cost Management?
Visualise future and current costs for your azure account
What are the 5 Support plans?
Basic Developer Standard Professional Direct Premier
What does the basic and all support plans include?
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
What does developer support plan offer
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
What does standard support plan offer
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
What does professional direct support plan offer
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
What does premier support plan offer
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
What are tickets
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
What are channels?
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
What is Knowledge center?
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!
What is a Service Level Agreement?
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
What is a Service Lifecycle?
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
What are subscription limits
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.
How can you organise multiple subscriptions
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.
How do you merge two Pay As You Go subscriptions?
Contact Azure support
What does General Availability mean
The last stage in the service lifecyle
How do you monitor for feature updates and product changes
You can monitor the Azure update feed to watch for previews, new features and updates
How do you transfer billing ownership?
Via cost management and billing in the portal
How do you change your subscription offer type?
TBC
