1. Planning and managing costs
In this video, we'll learn more about how costs are handled in Azure.
2. Factors that affect costs
There are several factors that influence costs in Azure. We'll discuss the most important cost factors: consumption, subscription type, resource type and settings, and region and billing zones.
Knowing that pay-as-you-go is the standard pricing model in Azure, consumption logically affects costs. As resources are used, costs are made. Note that only creating resources does not lead to costs; only their actual use counts.
The second factor is subscription type. Some subscription types include allowances or products that are free. The free Azure account, for example, provides users with a limited free use of some services.
Resource type and settings are another important factor. Resources can have higher tiers, which lead to higher costs. A virtual machine, for example, has different sizing tiers that offer more computing power but also cost more.
Finally, costs are also dependent on Azure Region. Not only can pricing differ depending on the region you're in, but you will also be charged costs if there are data transfers to other regions.
3. Ways to manage costs
Now that we know which factors affect costs, we can look to strategies to reduce those costs.
The first strategy is to have maintenance and monitoring processes in place. These can help us find resources that are underused or have higher-than-average costs.
Second, it might be worth looking at other pricing models than pay-as-you-go. This is especially interesting if there is a long-term stable demand for resources in Azure Cloud rather than a need for short-term flexibility.
For costs related to geography, we can minimize data transfers to other Azure Regions.
Finally, Azure also provides several cost management tools. These help us with cost estimation, budgets, and spending alerts. We'll see more about these tools in the next video.
4. Cost management tasks
Let's now discuss some examples of cost management tasks in Azure.
If your on-premises infrastructure needs to be migrated to the cloud, you can compare costs with the same environment in Azure Cloud.
If you need to create new resources, you can first estimate how much they are going to cost.
For resources that are already being used, you can get insights into spending by doing a cost analysis and setting up budgets or alerts.
For each of these tasks, Azure provides tools to assist you. We'll discuss these tools in more detail in the following video.
5. Example use case: costs of a virtual machine (VM)
Suppose you're working on a data project for which you need to create a new virtual machine in Azure.
The budget is tight, so you need to balance the requirements of the project with the available budget.
To assist with this task, you can estimate the costs of the VM and other needed resources beforehand.
Azure will also inform you of the cost per month once you are in the process of creating the VM and choosing its size.
Once the VM is up and running, Azure can assist in monitoring its usage and costs.
6. Let's practice!
Let's dive into some exercises and check what you have learned.