January 14, 2021

Optimize Operating Costs with Cloud Economics in Azure

11 minutes

Navigate Cloud Economics in Azure, and see radical cost savings for your organization based on your specific workloads. Cloud billing is tied to compute and storage, which includes the underlying software licensing fees. Costs accrue via a pay for what you consume model, versus the up-front server infrastructure and software licensing costs that you would typically pay on-premises in your data center. Join Matt McSpirit, Microsoft Azure’s Senior Product Manager, to see how the cloud consumption model in Azure applies.

The Cloud is infinitely flexible; it’s not “one size fits all.” A major advantage of the Cloud is the power it gives you to elastically scale compute resources in response to different peaks in your business. As you pay for what you consume, consider how you will consume resources for your specific workloads in order to get the best pricing.

Unpredictable workloads:

Add and subtract resources as you need them, resulting in variable costs.

Purposefully architecting for elasticity can help to save costs

Predictable workloads:

Make an upfront commitment to consume at a certain level for a longer period of time, and you can benefit from fixed costs at reduced pricing.

Azure Dedicated Host provides the physical servers you need dedicated to your Azure subscription

Azure Reservations allows you to commit resources for one-year or three-year plans for multiple services

Across both of these consumption approaches, one of the most important levers to keep your costs in check, is software licensing which can make up to 30-40% of your Cloud bill. Once you are in Azure, the Azure Cost Management tool allows you to set target budgets and track against spending. And if you are trying to reduce your carbon footprint, studies show that Microsoft cloud services are up to 93 percent more energy-efficient and up to 98 percent more carbon-efficient than datacenters run on-premises.

► QUICK LINKS:

00:00 - Introduction

00:22 - How cloud pricing works

02:39 - Software licensing

03:35 - Paying for what you consume

04:08 - Variable costs

05:15 - Fixed costs

06:29 - See economic tips put to the test/Azure pricing calculator

09:57 - Managing costs over time

► Link References:

To learn more, check out https://aka.ms/AzureCloudEconomic

For more information on licenses, visit https://aka.ms/Licensing

Leverage the free Azure Pricing Calculator, available at https://aka.ms/azurepricingcalculator

Check calculations at https://aka.ms/WSOpenLicensing and https://aka.ms/SAMechanics

Find pricing details for SQL Server at https://aka.ms/SQLOpenLicensing

Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? We are Microsoft’s official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at #Microsoft.

Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries?sub_confirmation=1

...more