Understand Azure Pricing and Support Flashcards
_____: a logical container used to provision resources in Microsoft Azure
Azure Subscription
_____: includes a $200 credit to spend on any service for the first 30 days, free access to the most popular Azure products for 12 months, and access to more than 25 products that are always free. This is an excellent way for new users to get started. To set up a _____, you need a phone number, a credit card, and a Microsoft account
Azure Free Subscription
_____: charges you monthly for the services you used in that billing period. This subscriptions type is appropriate for a wide range of users, from individuals to small businesses, and many large organizations as well
Azure Pay-as-You-Go (PAYG) Subscription
_____: provides flexibility to buy cloud services and software licenses under one agreement, with discounts for new licenses and Software Assurance. It is targeted at enterprise-scale organizations
Azure Enterprise Agreement
_____: includes $100 in Azure Credits to be used within the first 12 months plus select free services without requiring a credit card to sign-up. You must verify your student status through your organizational email address
Azure for Students Subscription
There are three main customer types on which the available purchasing options for Azure products and services are contingent: _____: customers sign an _____ Agreement with Azure that commits them to spend a negotiated amount on Azure services, which they pay annually. _____ customers also have access to customized Azure pricing
Enterprise
There are three main customer types on which the available purchasing options for Azure products and services are contingent: _____: customers pay general public prices for Azure resources, and their monthly billing and payments occur through the Azure website
Web Direct
There are three main customer types on which the available purchasing options for Azure products and services are contingent: _____: typically are Microsoft partner companies that a customer hires to build solutions on top of Azure. Payment and billing for Azure usage occur through the customer’s _____
Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)
When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates one or more _____ instances for that resource. The _____ track the resources’ usage, and generate a usage record that is used to calculate your bill. The _____ and pricing vary per products and often have different pricing tiers based on the size or capacity of the resource
Meter
The key takeaway is that resources are always charged based on _____
Usage
Just like your on-premises equipment costs, there are several elements that will affect your monthly costs when using Azure services: _____, _____, _____, and _____
Resource Type, Services, Location, and Azure Billing Zones
Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure datacenters. Most of the time inbound data transfers are free. For outbound data transfers, the data transfer pricing is based on _____. A _____ is a geographical grouping of Azure regions for billing purposes
Azure Billing Zone
_____: a free web-based tool that allows you to input Azure services and modify properties and options of the services. It outputs the costs per service and total cost for the full estimate
Azure Pricing Calculator
If you are starting to migrate to the cloud, a useful tool you can use to predict your cost savings is the _____. With the _____ you define your workloads (servers, databases, storage networking), adjust assumptions (Storage Costs, IT Labor Costs, Hardware Costs, Software Costs, Electricity Costs, Virtualization Costs, Datacenter Costs, Networking Costs, and Database Costs), and view the report
Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
_____: is a free service built into Azure that provides recommendations on high availability, security, performance, and cost. It analyzes your deployed services and looks for ways to improve your environment across those four areas
Azure Advisor
Advisor makes cost recommendations in the following areas: _____: this identifies ExpressRoute circuits that have been in the provider status of Not Provisioned for more than one month and recommends deleting the circuit if you aren’t planning to provision it with your connectivity provider
Eliminating Unprovisioned Azure ExpressRoute Circuits
Advisor makes cost recommendations in the following areas: _____: this will review your VM usage over the last 30 days and determine if you could save money in the future by _____. Advisor will show you the regions and sizes where you potentially have the most savings and will show you the estimated savings you might achieve from _____
Buy Reserved Instances
Advisor makes cost recommendations in the following areas: _____: this monitors your VM usage for 14 days and then identifies underutilized VMs. VMs whose average CPU utilization is 5% or less and network usages is 7MB or less for four or more days are considered underutilized VMs. The average CPU utilization threshold is adjustable up to 20%. By identifying these VMs, you can decide to resize them to a smaller instance type, reducing costs
Right-Size or Shutdown Underutilized VMs
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: Visual Studio subscribers can activate a monthly credit benefit which allows you to experiment with, develop, and test new solutions on Azure. The _____ amount varies based on the program level. Note, this _____ is for development and testing only and does not carry a financially-backed SLA
Azure Credits
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: by default, Azure subscriptions which have associated monthly credits (which includes trial accounts) have a _____ to ensure you aren’t charged once you have used up your credits. This feature is useful for development teams exploring new solution architectures as it ensures you won’t have an unexpectedly large bill at the end of the month. The _____ feature is specific to subscriptions that include a monthly Azure credit allotment. It is not available on pay-only subscriptions
Spending Limits
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: if you have VM workloads that are static and predictable, particularly ones that run 24x7x365, using _____ is a fantastic way to potentially save up to 70-80% depending on the VM size. _____ are purchased in one-year or three-year terms, with payment required for the full term up front. After it is purchased, Microsoft matches up the _____ to running instances and decrements the hours from your reservation. _____ can be purchased through the Azure portal. And because _____ are a compute discount, they are available for both Windows and Linux VMs
Reserved Instances
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: the cost of Azure products, services, and resources can vary across locations and regions, and if possible, you should use them in those locations and regions where they cost less
Choose Low-Cost Locations and Regions
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: keep up-to-date with the latest Azure customer and subscription offers, and switch to offers that provide the most significant cost-saving benefit
Research Available Cost-Saving Offers
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: the process of resizing a VM to a proper size based on its normal utilization
Right Size Underutilized VMs
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: if you have VM workloads that are only used during certain periods but they are always running, you are wasting money. These VMs are great candidates to shut down when not in use and start back up on a schedule
Deallocate VMs in Off-Hours
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: regularly review your environment and delete resources you no longer need
Delete Unused VMs
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: _____: PaaS and SaaS are generally less costly than IaaS
Migrate to PaaS or SaaS
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: many of the Azure services you deploy have the choice of running on Windows or Linux. In some cases, the cost of the product can be different based on the OS you choose. Where you have a choice, and your application doesn’t depend on the underlying OS, it’s useful to compare pricing to determine whether you can save money
Linux vs. Windows
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: many customers have invested in Windows Server Licenses and would like to repurpose this investment on Azure. The _____ gives customers the right to use these licenses for VMs on Azure. That means you won’t be charged for the Windows Server License and instead be billed the Linux rate.To be eligible for this benefit, your Windows licenses must be covered by Software Assurance
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: an Azure-based benefit that enables you to use your SQL server licenses with active Software Assurance to pay a reduced rate.You can use this benefit even if the Azure resource is active, but the reduced rate will only be applied from the time you select it in the portal. No credit will be issues retroactively
Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: if you are a customer of an Enterprise agreement and already have an investment in SQL server licenses, and they have freed up as part of moving resources to Azure, you can provision _____ images off the Azure marketplace, giving you the ability to take advantage of these unused licenses and reduces your Azure VM cost
Bring Your Own SQL Server License (BYOL)
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: a lot of people are unaware that _____ is a free product fornonproduction use. _____ has all the same features that Enterprise Edition has, but for nonproduction workloads, you can save dramatically on your licensing costs
Use SQL Server Developer Edition
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: many customers have high requirements for memory, storage, or I/O bandwidth but low CPU core counts. Based on this popular request, Microsoft has made available the most popular VM sizes (DS, ES, GS, and MS) in new sizes that constrain the vCPU count to one half or one-quarter of the original VM size, while maintaining the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth
Use Constrained Instance Sizes for Database Workloads
Best Practices for Minimizing Costs: Save on Licensing Costs: _____: a benefit you can take advantage of to save costs on your non-production environments. This benefit gives you several discounts, most notably for Windows workloads, eliminating license charges and only billing you at the Linux rate for VMs. This also applies to SQL Server and any other Microsoft software that is covered under a Visual Studio subscription (formerly known as MDSN).
There are a few requirements for this benefit, one being that it’s only for non-production workloads, and another being that any users of these environments (excluding testers) must be covered under a Visual Studio subscription. In short, for non-production workloads, this allows you to save money on your Windows, SQL Server, and other Microsoft virtual machine workloads
Use Dev/Test Subscription Offers
_____: a free, built-in Azure tool that can be used to gain greater insights into where your cloud money is going. You can see historical breakdowns of what services you are spending your money on and how it is tracking against budgets that you have set. You can set budgets, schedule reports, and analyze your cost areas
Azure Cost Management
_____: a Microsoft subsidiary, allows you to track cloud usage and expenditures for your Azure resources and other cloud providers including AWS and Google. Easy-to-understand dashboard reports help with cost allocation and chargebacks. Cost Management helps optimize your cloud spending by identifying underutilized resources that you can then manage and adjusts. Usage for Azure is free, and there are paid options for premium support and to view data from other clouds
Cloudyn
Every Azure subscriptions includes free access to the following support services: _____, _____, _____, _____, and _____
Billing and subscription support, Azure products and services documentation, Online self-help documentation, Whitepapers, and Community support forums
Microsoft offers four paid Azure support plans for customers who require technical and operational support: _____:
- Scope: trial and non production environments
- Technical support: business hours access to Support Engineers via email
- Case Severity/Response Times: Minimal business impact (Sev C): <8 business hours
- Architecture Support: General guidance
- Operations Support: N/A
- Training: N/A
- Proactive Guidance: N/A
- Launch Support: N/A
Developer
Microsoft offers four paid Azure support plans for customers who require technical and operational support: _____:
- Scope: Production workload environments
- Technical Support: 24x7 access to Support Engineers via email and phone
- Case Severity/Response Times: Critical business impact (Sev A): <1 hour
- Architecture Support: General guidance
- Operations Support: N/A
- Training: N/A
- Proactive Guidance: N/A
- Launch Support: N/A
Standard
Microsoft offers four paid Azure support plans for customers who require technical and operational support: _____:
- Scope: Business-critical dependence
- Technical Support: 24x7 access to Support Engineers via email and phone
- Case Severity/Response Times: Critical business impact (Sev A): <1 hour
- Architecture Support: Architectural guidance based on best practice delivered by ProDirect Delivery Manager
- Operations Support: Onboarding services, service reviews, Azure Advisor consultations
- Training: Azure Engineering-led web seminars
- Proactive Guidance: ProDirect Delivery Manager
- Launch Support: N/A
Professional Direct
Microsoft offers four paid Azure support plans for customers who require technical and operational support: _____:
- Scope: Substantial dependence across multiple products
- Technical Support: 24x7 access to Support Engineers via email and phone
- Case Severity/Response Times: Critical business impact (Sev A): <1 hour, <15 minutes (with Azure Rapid Response or Azure Event Management)
- Architecture Support: Customer-specific architectural support such as design reviews, performance tuning, configuration, and more
- Operations Support: Technical account manager-led service reviews and reporting
- Training: Azure Engineering-led web seminars, on-demand training
- Proactive Guidance: Designated Technical Account Manager
- Launch Support: Azure Event Management (available for additional fee)
Premier
There are several additional support channels available outside Azure’s official support plans: _____: a searchable database that contains answers to common support questions, from a community of Azure experts, developers, customers, and users. You can browse through all responses within the _____. Find specific solutions by entering keyword search terms into the text-entry field and further refine your search results by selecting products or tags from the lists provided by two dropdown lists
Azure Knowledge Center
There are several additional support channels available outside Azure’s official support plans: _____: get support by reading responses to Azure technical questions from Microsoft’s developers and testers on the _____
Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Forums
There are several additional support channels available outside Azure’s official support plans: _____: you can review answers to questions from the development community on _____
Stack Overflow
There are several additional support channels available outside Azure’s official support plans: _____: review community responses to questions about System and Network Administration in Azure on _____
Server Fault
There are several additional support channels available outside Azure’s official support plans: _____: read ideas and suggestions for improving Azure made by Azure users and customers on the _____
Azure Feedback Forums
There are several additional support channels available outside Azure’s official support plans: _____: tweet @AzureSupport to get answers and support from the official Microsoft Azure Twitter channel
_____: capture the specific terms that define the performance standards that apply to Azure. Microsoft maintains its commitment to providing customers with high-quality products and services by adhering to comprehensive operational policies, standards, and practices. A typical _____ specifies performance-target commitment that range from 99.9 percent (“three nines”) to 99.999 percent (“five nines”), for each corresponding Azure product or service.
*Note: Azure does not provide _____ for more services under the Free or Shared tiers. Also, free products such as Azure Advisor do not typically have an _____
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
_____: this means that an Azure feature is available to specific Azure customers for evaluation purposes. This is typically by invite only and issued directly by the product team responsible for the feature or service
Private Preview
_____: this means that an Azure feature is available to all Azure customers for evaluation purposes. These previews can be turned on through the preview features page
Public Preview
_____: once a feature has been evaluated and tested successfully, it might be released to customers as part of Azure’s default product set. This release is referred to as _____
General Availability (GA)
_____: click the “What’s New” link on the ? Help menu provides a list of recent updates you can periodically check to see what has changed in Azure
Monitor Feature Updates
