Cost Optimization Best Practices

Save on infrastructure

$50 per month for Visual Studio Professional, $150 per month for Visual Studio Enterprise
Separate Azure subscription under your account that renews each month while you remain an active Visual Studio subscriber
❗No SLA, development and testing only
- Azure suspends VMs used for production or that run more than 120 hours.

❗ Not available on pay-only subscriptions, only for subscriptions with a monthly Azure credits.
Helps you to prevent from exhausting the credit on your account within each billing period.
- Resets after each period
Activated by default, you can adjust the spending limit as desired or turn it off.

Purchase Windows/Linux VMs for one-year or three-year terms with payment of entire period or monthly.
Allows to save save up to 70 to 80 percent off the pay-as-you-go cost
💡 Good for static and predictable virtual machines.

Prices vary across locations and regions
💡 Good idea to use them in locations and regions where they cost less.
❗ Consider also that moving data between locations can cost extra and total price can get more expensive.
- Good idea to have them in same region to reduce egress (outgoing network bandwith) traffic between them.

Over-sized virtual machines are a common unnecessary expense on Azure
Azure Cost Management & Azure Advisor might recommend right-sizing or shutting down VMs.
Right-sizing = resizing it to a proper size
- E.g. downgrading Standard_D4sv3 with 90% idle VM to Standard_D2sv3 to reduce 50% cost.
❗ Resizing a VM requires it to be stopped, resized, and then restarted.
- 💡 Takes a few minutes so plan for an outage, or shift your traffic to another instance

No need to run VMs every hour of every day if they’re only used during certain periods.
Shut down when not in use and start back up on a schedule
- Saves money on compute costs, 📝 but you still pay for storage.
Can use automation accounts or auto-shutdown feature on a virtual machine to schedule automated shutdowns.

Saves you on infrastructure costs but also potentially on licensing and operations.

Evaluate your architecture if it’s beneficial to move to PaaS.
- Azure operateS hardware efficiently and therefore offer PaaS services cheaper.
Neutral evolution is to go from IaaS to PaaS iteratively when moving to cloud.
PaaS saves on resource and operational costs.
Effort varies
- SQL Server to => Azure SQL Database is very easy.
- Hard to move multi-tier application to a container or serverless-based architecture
  - No quick winds from cost-saving perspective
Azure Architecture Center can give ideas for transforming application & best-practices.

Allows you to use existing
- on-premises Windows Server licenses on Azure VMs. (Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server)
- SQL Server licenses for Azure SQL Databases. (Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server)
Pay only linux rates for those virtual machines
❗ Through Software Assurance licenses only.

If you’re on Enterprise Agreement: Enterprise Dev/Test
- Else Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) Dev/Test
Discounts:
- No license charges for Windows workloads, only billing you at the Linux rate
- SQL Server & other software under Visual Studio subscription (formerly known as MSDN) are included.
❗Users (except testers) must be covered under a Visual Studio subscription
❗Only for non-production workloads

Free product for nonproduction use.
Has all the same features that Enterprise Edition has
Can find SQL Server images for Developer Edition on the Azure Marketplace for development & testing.

Many have high requirements for memory, storage, or I/O bandwidth.
- Often have low requirements for CPU core counts
Can use VM sizes with lower vCPU count
Databases like SQL Server and Oracle are licensed per CPU
- Allows you to reduce licensing cost by up to 75 percent.