There are many potential benefits to public cloud adoption, enhanced resiliency, improved agility, cost reduction and many more, but its not a given that all these benefits will be realised just because “you’re in the cloud”, each use case and thus the benefits are unique.
Cost is one of the main reasons for that and more often than not the true cost of cloud will be more expensive that was initially expected. Be prepared to add cost management into your list of operational duties or ensure your managed service provider is in control of this. One challenge of doing this of course is understanding the bill in the first place. I often compare it to understanding your energy bill!
There are several ways to optimise your cloud environment to reduce your Azure bill, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but its a good starter (for 10.. pardon the pun).
- Move to Reserved Instances for and pre-pay for resources at a discount
- Switch off resources when they are not being used
- Right-size machines / Resources
- Take the time to understand your spending by using the Billing Portal, Power BI or other 3rd party analysis tools
- Use Auto-Scaling to reduce costs during off peak hours
- Make use of Azure PaaS Services as an alternative to deploying VM’s on IaaS
- Use Cold Data Storage (for infrequently accessed data)
- Make use of SQL elastic pools
- Delete unused managed and classic disks
- Fine tune application and database performance
A downloadable / printable version of this list can be found 10 ways to reduce your Azure cloud bill. As ever, additions to these ideas are very welcome.
