Optimizing Azure Costs

Microsoft Azure provides a variety of cloud services in a variety of cloud service models: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. When businesses migrate to the cloud, they must choose which model is best suited to their needs and is the most cost-effective. This lesson is designed to assist Cloud Architects in identifying their current Azure expenditures and providing greater awareness of the costs associated with each deployment model as well as each aspect of an Azure deployment.

Optimizing Azure costs begins with knowing your current Azure expenditures. This lesson introduces you to the tools built into the Azure Portal that can help you understand the total overall expenditures in Azure as well as break down those costs by area: Compute, Network, Storage, Identity, and App/Cloud Services.

The remainder of the lesson drills down on specific costs associated with each area of Azure identifies the costs associated with each service and provides very clear and concise methods for reducing Azure expenditures. Many of the cost savings methods will require minimal changes to your Azure deployment and will take just minutes to implement while other cost savings methods may take a shift in your Azure strategy, such as moving from Iaas to PaaS. By the end of this lesson, you will have gained a thorough understanding of how charges are incurred, how to reduce or even avoid some of the charges, and you will have learned how to significantly reduce overall Azure expenditures and get the most out of what is spent in your Azure deployment.

Learning Objectives

• Identify current Azure expenditures
• Optimize compute costs
• Optimize network costs
• Optimize storage costs
• Optimize identity costs
• Optimize App Service and Cloud Service costs

Intended Audience

• Azure architects who are exploring options for reducing their Azure spending

Prerequisites

• Good understanding of Azure administration and management