Azure Fundamentals part 6: Describe Azure cost management and service level agreements

by Paul Wood
in Azure
on 17 August 2021

Plan and manage your Azure costs

Below is the knowledge check from the end of this module:

Tailwind Traders is taking a methodical approach toward cloud migration. While proof-of-concept projects can help demonstrate technical feasibility, having a clear picture of the total cost of running in the cloud will further help the team validate its approach.

To start, the Tailwind Traders team used the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator to estimate the cost savings of operating its solution on Azure instead of in its on-premises datacenter.

From there, the team used the Pricing calculator to get a more detailed estimate for running a typical workload on Azure each month.

The team also created a checklist of cost-saving measures that it can use to help keep down costs. This list includes:

Perform cost analysis before you deploy.
Use Azure Advisor to monitor your usage.
Use spending limits to prevent accidental spending.
Use Azure Reservations to prepay.
Choose low-cost locations and regions.
Research available cost-saving offers.
Apply tags to identify cost owners.

With these measures in place, the Tailwind Traders team is ready to take the next steps toward cloud migration.

Next steps

If you run existing workloads on-premises or in the datacenter, try entering your existing workloads in the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator to see how the cost of running on Azure compares to what you pay today.

Then, use the Azure documentation to map your current infrastructure to cloud services. Use the Pricing calculator to get a more accurate picture of what it would cost to run your existing workloads on Azure.

Learn more

In this module, you learned about the many factors that affect the total cost of running on Azure.

The Control Azure spending and manage bills with Azure Cost Management + Billing learning path is a great next step toward learning how to monitor and control your Azure spending.

Here are additional resources to help you go further.

Purchase Azure services

If you’re just getting started with Azure, review commonly asked questions in the Azure free account FAQ to see whether a free trial account is right for you.
To learn more about how to purchase Azure products and services, see Explore flexible purchasing options for Azure.

Understand your bill

For more information about Azure usage charges, see Understand terms on your Microsoft Azure invoice.
To learn more about how bandwidth affects pricing, see Bandwidth pricing details.

Manage and minimize costs

See Azure Cost Management + Billing to learn more about analyzing costs, creating and managing budgets, exporting data, and reviewing and acting on recommendations.
Take advantage of significant discounts on development and testing workloads. To learn more, see Azure Dev/Test pricing.
Learn more about how Azure Reservations can save you money when you commit to one-year or three-year pricing plans.
Learn how to prevent unexpected charges with Azure billing and cost management.
See Azure spending limit to learn what happens when you reach your spending limit and how to remove it.
Learn how to start and stop VMs during off-hours.
See how Azure Hybrid Benefit can help save costs by bringing Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises licenses with Software Assurance to Azure.

Choose the right Azure services by examining SLAs and service lifecycle

Below is the knowledge check from the end of this module:

A service-level agreement (SLA) is the formal agreement between a service company and the customer. For Azure, this agreement defines the performance standards that Microsoft commits to for its customers.

The Tailwind Traders team is working on quite a variety of projects! In addition to its main website, the team is adding a mapping feature to its Special Orders application so that it can calculate routes between suppliers and retail stores. The team is also exploring how severe weather tracking can improve its drone guidance system.

As requirements evolve, it’s important for the team to understand how the SLA for each service it chooses affects the overall performance guarantees of its applications.

For example, the main website must be available as close to 100 percent of the time as possible. To accomplish that, Tailwind Traders might deploy extra instances of the same virtual machine across different availability zones in the same Azure region. Doing so helps ensure that if one zone is affected, virtual machine instances in the other zone can pick up the load.

The Special Orders application might have more flexible tolerances. As long as retail employees don’t lose data and can quickly regain network access, the Special Orders application might have a lower SLA. Here, the team can choose to include less redundancy in its design.

When defining your SLA requirements, be sure to consider both your business needs and the time it takes to restore a component after a failure. Also consider how the use of preview services and preview features might affect your systems in production.

Next steps

Create a sketch or diagram for an application that you plan to migrate to the cloud. Include each Azure service that you plan to use.

Use the documented Service Level Agreements to find out the SLA for each Azure service involved. Then compute the composite SLA for your application.

Does the composite SLA meet your requirements? If not, what can you do to improve it?

Learn more

In this module, you learned about several factors that affect service guarantees on Azure. You also learned how to access preview services and preview features. Here are additional resources to help you go further.

Work with preview services

Review the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.
Learn about updates and new product features on the Azure announcements blog.

Azure Fundamentals learning path

This module is part of the Azure Fundamentals part 6: Describe Azure cost management and service level agreements learning path, which is one of six learning paths for Azure Fundamentals.

Here are the learning paths in this series:

Tags: Azure, Fundamentals

Azure Fundamentals part 6: Describe Azure cost management and service level agreements