Contents
Managing Azure Costs
In this course, you’ll learn how to forecast Azure costs, choose the right subscription and purchasing options, track spending, and use cost reduction strategies.
Learning Objectives
- Use the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator to determine cost savings from migrating to Azure
- Understand Azure subscription and purchasing options
- Use the Pricing Calculator to forecast Azure service costs
- Apply Azure cost reduction strategies
- Create budgets and analyze spending using Azure Cost Management
Intended Audience
- Anyone who needs to manage costs on Azure
- People preparing to take either the Azure Fundamentals or Azure Solutions Architect exam
Prerequisites
- Basic knowledge of Azure (or take our Overview of Azure Services course)
The Total Cost of Ownership Calculator is good for helping you determine how much money you’ll save by migrating to Azure, but it’s not a general-purpose tool for figuring out how much any given Azure service will cost. For that, you need to use the Pricing Calculator.
For example, suppose you want to launch a website, and you’d like to get an estimate of how much it would cost to run it on Azure App Service. You’d go to the Pricing Calculator, and select “App Service”. Alternatively, you can start typing the product’s name here, which is often faster than trying to find it.
The options you need to choose depend on the specific service you’ve selected. For App Service, you need the region, the operating system, and the tier. The region is important because pricing is often different for different regions. The price is also different depending on which operating system you choose.
If you don’t know which tier you need, this information bubble will help, although it doesn’t give you all of the details for each tier. To get more information, you’d have to look in the documentation. But this is good enough for our purposes. We can set it to the Basic tier.
Once you’ve chosen the tier, you have more options to set. First, there’s the instance type. We can leave it with the default. Then you need to specify the number of instances and the number of hours. It seems kind of odd that the default here is 730 hours, doesn’t it? Well, that’s the average number of hours in a month. If you want, you can just change it to 1 month, which will give you the same price.
You can also set the number of SSL connections, which is another option that’s specific to App Service. SNI SSL connections are free, so if we set this to ‘1’, it doesn’t change the price.
Here’s the estimated monthly cost. Bear in mind that this is only an estimate, so the actual cost could be different. It’s usually close, though.
There are still a couple of other options that can change the price. First, you can choose a different support plan. Then there’s the licensing program.
If you want to get price estimates for other Azure services as well, then you can add them in the same way we added App Service, and the total monthly cost will include the cost of all of the services you’ve selected.
When you’re done, you can export it, save it, or share it. And that’s it for the Pricing Calculator.
Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. In his most recent venture, he founded and led a cloud-based training infrastructure company that provided virtual labs for some of the largest software vendors in the world. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand. His activities outside of work have included riding an elephant and skydiving (although not at the same time).