1. Using the Pricing Calculator
To help you manage costs, Azure provides several tools. The pricing calculator helps you calculate the price of different resources and complete resource and service set-ups.
In this video, we’ll see how to use the pricing calculator to calculate the monthly costs of a big data analytics set-up in Azure.
We can access the pricing calculator in Azure by first going to Cost Management.
From the Cost Management overview screen, we can click on ‘View pricing calculator’ at the bottom right. Note that you can also access the pricing calculator by going directly to its URL in your web browser. You don’t need to log in, but if you do log in, you’ll get more specific pricing, taking into account your pricing plan and potential discounts.
At the starting screen, the products tab is open. We can see popular Azure products here, and also browse through different categories. For example, we can go to ‘Analytics’ and click on ‘Azure Machine Learning’. This will add the Azure Machine Learning service to our estimate.
This estimate can be found by scrolling to the bottom. For now, I’ll clear the estimate by clicking on the ‘Delete all’ icon, as we only want to see the price of a big data analytics set-up.
We scroll back up, and then click on ‘Example scenarios’. This tab contains common architectural scenarios. We are interested in ‘Advanced analytics on big data’. You’ll see a visual representation of the proposed architectural solution, from ingesting the data, over storage, to modelling and sending the data to PowerBI or a web application. If you’d like some additional information and recommendations by
Microsoft related to this solution, you can click on ‘Learn more’. To get the estimate for this solution, we click on ‘Add to estimate’.
After loading, we can see the full estimate by scrolling down. The pricing calculator has automatically added the necessary services and resources that were present in the visual representation. You can click the information icon to get more information on each part.
If you click on the product itself, you can see and configure some additional settings. The default settings are based on common usage patterns. For each product, the pricing calculator lists the estimated price.
The total price is listed at the bottom. You can also change the currency here. If you want to save or share the estimate, you can do so with these buttons after logging in. You can also export the result to Excel without the need to log in first.
Any saved estimates can be found at the top of the pricing calculator page, using the tab ‘Saved estimates’.
Over to you now!
2. Let's practice!