Azure Cost Optimization - Tips

 It is very important to have tight control of the cost and manage it efficiently.  Cloud Computing has two major tasks. i.e. Store Data and execute code. Networking is an essential element used to tie systems together and implement security.

 Below are some of the tips that can help teams who are looking to optimize costs.

Compute Charges

Compute services are those that take your code and execute it in the cloud. There are several compute resources (around 20) in azure. All these services have virtual machines as their core. Examples are AKS, VMSS, etc

 

 Storage Charges

 

Type	Description	Key points	Factors impact storage cost
Unmanaged Storage	It relies on the user to monitor and react to the accounts Blobs, Files, Table Data, Queue messages	The storage account has a maximum capacity.  5 PiB	GB's Used
		It has Operations per second limit	IO Operations
		Violations will get errors but the advantage is paid for what you use	Region
		Nothing will be changed if no data is in a storage account	Redundancy
		Unmanaged storage is extremely cheap	Access tier(Premium, hot, cool, Archive)
Managed Storage
	Managed disks. Used by VM's	premium disks are very expensive
	e.g.: HDD, (Sold  Premium, Ultra) SSD

 

Guidelines and recommendations for optimizing storage cost.

Total Storage cost covers the cost to store data and the cost to perform file operations

Costs to store files	Cost to perform File Operations(listing, writing, reading on storage accounts)
Are you storing log files for many months that you may not need?	If you expecting millions of reads and writes per month, it might be cheaper to use a premium storage tier that hot one
Are you storing memory dumps?	Premium storage is used more for storage and less for access. Recommended ·        Production load Premium disks, ·        Standard disks - for QA/Dev
Are you storing System backups from years/months ago with no regulatory reasons to keep them	if a file is placed in the cool tier, it will be charged for a min of 30 days even if you delete before then
if you delete VM, ensure deleting associated DISK	Sometimes, People enable read access geo-redundant storage which is 3 or 4 times of local redundant storage. Do you use a secondary endpoint for read purposes? If they just wanted in a different region, then why not use GRS instead of RAGRS?
Premium charges most for storage but charges less for reading, if storage performance is a primary concern then select premium, if this file is not used frequently then it should move to the cool tier. If you don't need that file, you can reduce costs further by moving to the archive	Redundancy impacts costs - LRS is cheap and RA-GRS is expensive. Reserve storage if you use more than 100 TB of data and save 30% of the cost

 

Other Services

 

App Service	Are you creating different appservice plan for multiple webapps	Creating different app service plans may not be needed. Create it only when there is capacity requirements
AKS		Dev, Test, and non-business hrs. reduce to zero instance cluster
Networking	single app gateway can host multiple applications	same with respect to WAF
Media Services	streaming can be standard and premium	98% of workload standard is fine, encoding can be done  2 ways
App Insights	data ingestion	90 days is free, enables data sampling(50%/75%), Keep  a daily cap on data
Log Analytics		Leverage Reserve capacity for data ingestion