Azure VM Pricing Tiers

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

 

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.