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Azure VM Pricing Tiers
Contents
Overview of the course
What is a Virtual Machine?
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines
Configuration Management
Design and Implement VM Storage
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs
Summary
Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines
Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.
Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn
Lesson | What you'll learn |
---|---|
Overview | Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives |
What is a Virtual Machine? | Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs |
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs | Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs |
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines | Understand VM scaling, load-balancing, and Availability Sets in Azure Resource Manager |
Configuration Management | Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs |
Design and Implement VM Storage | Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption |
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs | Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts. |
Summary | Course summary and conclusion |
GitHub Code Repository
With all the advantages of the cloud, everything comes at a cost. Just as we did on-premises when budgeting to buy hardware, we must also budget and understand Azure Pricing for all our resource needs. Luckily Microsoft Azure is very transparent when it comes to Pricing and calculating the cost of each and every resource. Let’s visit the Pricing documentation on Azure’s website:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/
Since, for now, we are interested in VM pricing, let’s select “Virtual Machines.” We’re presented with a page to select our Operating System, Region, Currency and price group of per hour or per month. Let’s select a Windows OS from the East Region, and display pricing by month. We can then see various VM categories. This is a an easy way to present all the different SKUs we saw in the Portal for the VM size to help us better choose a VM that best suits our needs.
Let’s select “Compute Optimized” which is High-CPU-to-memory ratio. This displays the ‘F-series’ VMs along with the information we’d expect similar to what we saw in the portal: the instance SKU, number of Cores, RAM, Disk Size per CPU core, and Price per month.
While we’re here I also would like to show you a really cool feature of this site which I really love. Scroll to the top and select “Calculator.”
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines
Here you can pick items akin to a shopping cart and get a rolling aggregate of the cost for each resource as well as the total cost for all resources added. So far, we already have the Virtual Machine resource added. Let’s select an “A3” VM. The default 744 hours is 31 days and thus we get the per month cost. Let’s increase the number of VMs to 4, and now we see an updated cost.
Let’s click “Add Items” and select a SQL Database. We get a pop-up saying the item was added. Now you see we can easily calculate the cost of the SQL Database based on specific parameters to this resource. This is an easy way to view and calculate resources before you provision them. Again, these are all estimates and your cost may be more or less depending on how much actual resources you use.
Chris has over 15 years of experience working with top IT Enterprise businesses. Having worked at Google helping to launch Gmail, YouTube, Maps and more and most recently at Microsoft working directly with Microsoft Azure for both Commercial and Public Sectors, Chris brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team in architecting complex solutions and advanced troubleshooting techniques. He holds several Microsoft Certifications including Azure Certifications.
In his spare time, Chris enjoys movies, gaming, outdoor activities, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.