Azure Tutorials Series - Best Optimisation practices

-
Having gone through the Scaling concept in previous article, we know that by using few services such as Azure advisor or Azure Cost management, we could reduce the cost by significant margin, it could save you extra bucks from which you can buy any other resource or Service. In this article we would look at some of the best optimisation practices when you are working on Azure.

Best Optimisation Practices

Infrastructure Saving

  • Use Azure Credits
  • Use spending limits
  • Using reserved instances
  • Choose low cost locations and regions
  • Resizing VMs using Azure Advisor and Azure Cost Management
  • Schedule automated shutdowns of the VMs using Azure Resource Manager(ARM)
  • Delete unused VMs
  • Migrate to PaaS or SaaS services.

Save on Licensing Costs

  • Select OS wisely
  • Bring your own license(BYOL)
  • Use SQL server developer edition
  • Use Dev/Test Subscription offers
    • If you are on Enterprise Agreement(EA) ,use Enterprise Dev/Test else Pay-as-you-go Dev/Test
    • No license charges for windows
Let's see some more in-depth details which can save you some money

We can always balance between cost and performance 

Using Meters 
  • For each resource purchased, an instance is created to track its usage. Customer is charged on monthly basis based on the usage. After which meters are reset.
Bandwidth
  • Transfers involving inbound date to Azure are free whereas outbound data is charged.
Azure Pricing Calculator
  • Azure provides free calculator to get an estimate for the services
  • Azure Pricing calculator let's you modify few parameter such as 
    • Region
    • Tier - Basic, low priority or Standard
    • Billling options
    • Support options
    • Azure Dev/Test pricing
Azure Advisor
  • Gives recommendations on 
    • Reduces cost by eliminating unprovisioned Azure ExpressRoute circuits
    • Buy Reserved instances to save money over pay-as-you-go
    • Analysis of the usage over last 30 days and recommendations
    • Recommends regions where you could save some money
    •  Allows shutdown of under-utilised machines, scale in or scale out
Azure Cost Management
  • Allows users to set budgets, schedule reports and analyse cost areas.
  • Features of Azure Cost management are 
    • Report on cost and usage
    • Categorise by resource tags
    • Manage and alert cost and usage budgets
    • Free for Azure
Azure TCO(Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator
  • Online tool -
  • Compares on-prem vs cloud costs
  • Gives you an estimation on how much you can save.


These were few hacks/ practices which could help you save few bucks for Azure subscription.

Happy Learning!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azure Tutorials Series - Azure Networking

-
Image
In this article, we will learn about Azure networking concepts such as architecture, microservices, virtual networks, VPNs, subnet, VPN gateways and most importantly Network Security Group(NSG). All these terms are to be understood if you appearing for AZ900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals exam. Azure Networking In previous articles we have learnt about Micro- services and how they work, these are alos loosely coupled architecture. Some of the features includes Independent components interact with each other with the help of queues Can be updated and deployed independently Highly scalable Supports Asynchronous messaging N-tier Architecture Supports loosely coupled architecture Application divided into multiple tiers such that higher tier can access lower tier but not vice versa Tiers are re-usable and can be updated or replaced easily without any hassle. Three-tier in general Web Tier(front end) Application tier(back end) Data tier(Storage) Virtual Network Isolated network shared by few g...
Read more

Testing in CI/CD

-
If you are part of testing fraternity you would have heard CI/CD numerous times by now. It's the talk of the software testing town. In this article, we will cover the basics of CI/CD, what actually it is and how it is implemented in software testing. What is continuous integration? In simple terms, development teams can integrate their code into a shared repository. This helps in maintaining code quality and identifying potential issues with the local version of the code at an early stage. What is continuous delivery? Everything that is being continuously merged by the development team, is continuously deployed to the live environment. Continuous delivery is often coined as ‘Continuous Deployment’ as well. Since most developers work in parallel, continuously integrating their code into one repository would mean that the master branch is continuously updated with new features. In order to ensure that there is no compromise in the code quality with so many changes...
Read more

Azure Tutorials Series - IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS

-
Image
We already have covered Public vs Private vs Hybrid differentiation in the previous article. In this article we will be covering three categories of cloud computing with relevant examples and details. Most of you might already be using these services in your daily day-to-day tasks unaware of the face that your organisation has already started the transition into the cloud. For an example, Office 365 is a active SaaS(Software as a service) that most of us uses, VMs are examples of IaaS(Infrastructure as a service) and Azure SQL Database is PaaS(Platform as a service). Now how do we differentiate between the three categories as a user? Will cover the details below. Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) Service provider provides you the hardware User gets some control over the hardware, can customise operating system, storage and VMs. Ensuring service is up and running is shared responsibility While cloud provider makes sure that the hardware is functioning correctly, user needs to make sure ...
Read more