How to reduce the cost in Azure Cloud? How many companies often complain about cloud spending is more than On-PERM operations? Even though why companies still prefer to move their operations to the cloud? With great power comes great responsibility. Many companies simply get onboarded in to cloud without proper governance and poor cost tracking techniques.
#1 – Turn off the VM’s if it’s not used
In ON-PREM, you buy hardware and data center space to run the operations. So your capital expense (CapEx) will high and paid a lot of money for the servers and got it racked in. Other routine expenses like security, electricity, and cooling will be an extra. Since companies paid a lot of money to set up the environment, they would like to get maximum out of it. Once the VM builds and powered on, it will keep running until its lifetime. It doesn’t matter if anybody using it or not. VM will be running round the clock. Yeah… it’s… ON-PREM, you need to pay an extra bit of amount for electricity and cooling. People tend to leave the VM running for their convenience.
In the Cloud, this is very critical. If you are running machines that nobody is using, then you are paying for something that nobody is getting value from. If no one is using the production system could be a different story but not for development and QA systems. Turn off the unused systems in the cloud to save big. Ensure that VM’s should be de-allocated.
- Enable auto-shutdown option for the VM
- Use Powershell to stop/start VM automatically.
#2 – Choose the correct VM size
If we are creating the VMs in ON-PERM, the mindset is to get big, powerful machines and could do whatever needed to do! But in the cloud, we have to be very precise and well about your workload that you are going to run on those cloud IaaS instances. If you don’t size the VMs properly you might end up paying double the cost.
Example: (Microsoft Pricing Calculator )
- Monthly cost for Azure Windows VM B8MS (8 vCPU(s), 32 GB RAM) = 314.63 USD
- Monthly cost for Azure Windows VM B4MS (4 vCPU(s), 16 GB RAM) = 157.68 USD
#3 Linux first approach
Windows Servers are real fat operating systems and require more system resources to run smoothly. Linux is on the other hand it’s very slim and even it can run on size B1MS (1vCPU & 1GB memory). When it comes to enterprise, will deploying more instances and if you choose Linux, it’s going to be a massive game-changer.
Microsoft claims that Linux is the most used OS in Microsoft Azure. This trend is going to continue and customers should always prefer Linux over windows. Here is the RedHat whitepaper to know about the studies.
#4 Choose the appropriate region
The Azure costs differ for each region. US Central is costlier than US East. US West2 is cheaper than the US East. So select the region based on business needs. Use the Azure calculator to determine the cost for each region during the design phase.
- Select nearby region
- Ensure it’s cheaper compare to other regions.
- Select the region which provides the availability zone.
#5 Use reserved instance
If you have the plan to run the instances 24×7, then you need to consider using the reserved instance feature. It can potentially save more than 50% of the instance cost. Microsoft offers 1 year or 3-year reservation options which could save around 72% of the instance cost. There is an option choose to bill monthly even though reservation for a year or 3 years. This option can even reduce the burden of paying the full upfront reservation cost. You could cancel anytime if you want to stop the VM.
