It’s no secret that Azure can be costly if you don’t keep an eye on your usage and put measures in place to reduce your spend. I’ve put this post together with some common ways to reduce your Azure costs as much as possible.
Azure Advisor
The first and most obvious place to look is Azure Advisor. Advisor offers recommendations for security, reliability, operational excellence, performance and most importantly for this post: cost.
To find it, simply search for Advisor in the Azure portal
Click on the Cost blade and you will receive some recommendations, or in my case a recommendation to purchase a Reserved Instance for a single virtual machine, potentially saving 833USD per year.
If you click on the description you’ll be shown the affected resource, more detail about the recommendation and the affected subscription. If you had more resources in your subscription, it’ll likely show much more recommendations here, so keep an eye out. Some of the recommendations in Advisor will match the recommendations below so its a great first place to start.
Reserved Instances
As above, Reserved Instances are one method of reducing your Azure costs. Reserved Instances are effectively you committing to use a certain size of resource for a given period of time, either 1 or 3 years. For example, you may have a virtual machine that you know will be online and utilised for a year, in which case Reserved Instance pricing will be much lower than your typical Pay as you go pricing.
To highlight the potential savings, using the Azure Pricing Calculator, I’ve chosen a DS3 v2 virtual machine in the Central India region, as you can see with Pay as you go pricing the cost would be around £208.04 per month, just for the compute (excluding disks and bandwidth usage).
Just by selecting 1 year reserved, our cost is reduced to £95.56 per month.
You can still pay monthly for Reserved Instance, for the same price, or if paying upfront is preferred you can do that too.
It’s not just virtual machines that can benefit from reservations though, for a full list have a look a the Azure Documentation. There’s also information on purchasing, refunding and exchanging reservations.
Budgets
Budgets are a really useful tool within the Azure portal to receive a notification if you are expected to hit a forecasted amount of your spend. To view and set budgets, go into a subscription, then click on Budgets.
Click Add.
In my case I only have just over £100 to use in my subscription, so I will set my budget to £100. The graph on the right hand side is useful to see your previous month spedn and forecasted spend for future months based on your usage.
On the next screen you can then specify when you want your alerts to be sent. You have the option to choose actual usage, or forecasted usage. Actual will alert when you reach the given percentage of your budget and forecasted will alert when Azure believes you are going to go above the specified percentage of your budget.
You can choose an action group, and just below if you don’t have any action groups you can click Manage action group to create one. This action group could call certain actions such as Automation Runbooks, Azure Functions or integrate with your ITSM to log a ticket to your service desk. For example, you could use an Automation Runbook to shut down or scale down certain resources if a budget is reached.
Specify an email recipient for your alert, then click Create.
Hybrid Benefit
A significant portion of some Azure resources is the Microsoft licensing, for a Windows Server running Microsoft SQL, its around 85% of the total cost. Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you utilise your on-premises Software Assurance licensing, RedHat and SUSE Linux subscriptions to reduce your Azure costs. Many companies had already purchased Software Assurance before their Azure migrations so it makes sense to utilise these licenses in the cloud.
To utilise Hybrid Benefit is easy. Simply browse to a virtual machine in the Azure portal and click on the Configuration blade. Then change the license type to either Window server or Windows client, select Yes to say you’d like to use an existing license, then tick the box to confirm that you “have an eligible Windows Server license with Software Assurance or Windows Server subscription to apply this Azure Hybrid Benefit.”
Click Save at the top, then go into the virtual machine and apply the license in Windows.
Right Sizing
It’s perhaps quite obvious but a really key thing for saving on Azure costs. If you, or your colleagues have incorrectly chosen the right size of virtual machine, SQL Database, or other Azure resource then you’re unnecessarily paying for those resources. It’s not uncommon to find virtual machines that are over-sized for the requirements. In this case I’d recommend using your monitoring tool of choice (maybe that Azure Monitor, or otherwise) and looking for virtual machines that could be allocated less memory or CPU, then downsize accordingly.