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.