The strategies for cost optimization post described tools and services to understand costs in Azure.
This post explores several ways to reduce the cost of your cloud environment, including:
- Right-sizing: Ensure that you are using the right amount of resources for your workloads. This means using the appropriate instance type, storage type, and storage size.
- Auto-scaling: Use auto-scaling capabilities to automatically adjust the number of running instances based on the workload demand. This can help to reduce costs by only using the resources that are needed. Read more about effective ways to scale and scaling Azure App Services.
- Scheduling: Schedule non-production resources, such as development and testing environments, to be turned off during non-business hours or periods of low usage to reduce costs.
- Reserved instances: Consider purchasing reserved instances for long-term commitments, this can provide a significant discount compared to on-demand pricing.
- Optimizing storage: Review your storage usage and consider using different types of storage for different types of data. For example, cold data can be stored on less expensive storage options.
- Identify and eliminate idle resources: Regularly review your environment to identify and eliminate any idle or underutilized resources.
- Monitor costs: Regularly monitor your costs and usage, set up alerts and budgets to be notified of any unexpected spikes in costs
- Spot instances: Use spot instances, which provide a way to bid on spare capacity at a lower price than on-demand instances.
- Remove Orphaned Resources: Remove resources that are no longer being used or needed by an application or service.
- Azure Hybrid Licensing: Customers can use their existing licenses for Microsoft products, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, to access corresponding Azure services, such as Azure Virtual Machines and Azure SQL Database.
How many of right-size techniques are you using?
Right-sizing resources in Azure involves optimizing the usage of compute, storage, and other resources to minimize costs while still meeting the performance and availability requirements of your applications. Here are some ways to right-size resources in Azure:
- Monitor resource utilization: Monitor the utilization of resources like CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage I/O to determine if they are being under-utilized or over-utilized.
- Use Azure Monitor: collect, analyze, and visualize performance data and usage patterns for your resources. This can help you identify areas where you can optimize resource usage and reduce costs.
- Use Azure Autoscale: Azure Autoscale automatically adjusts the number of instances in an application based on its usage patterns. This can help ensure that you have the right number of resources to meet demand while avoiding over-provisioning.
- Use Azure DevOps: Azure DevOps can help you automate the process of right-sizing resources by integrating with Azure Monitor and Azure Autoscale. You can define policies that automatically adjust the number of instances based on resource utilization or schedule scaling operations based on the time of day.
- Consider resource types: Consider the type of resources you are using, such as virtual machines, containers, or functions, and choose the ones that are most cost-effective for your workloads.
- Use Azure Cost Management & Billing: Use Azure Cost Management & Billing to track your resource usage and costs and to identify areas where you can optimize your usage to reduce costs.
Are you paying for orphaned resources?
Orphaned resources in Azure refer to resources that are no longer being used or needed by an application or service, but are still present and consuming resources in the Azure environment. These resources may include virtual machines, storage accounts, network interfaces, and other Azure resources.
Orphaned resources can occur for a number of reasons, such as when a service or application is decommissioned, when resources are accidentally created but not deleted, or when there is a lack of proper resource management processes in place.
The presence of orphaned resources in an Azure environment can lead to increased costs and security risks. Therefore, it’s important to regularly identify and delete orphaned resources to optimize resource usage and reduce costs.
To identify and delete orphaned resources in Azure, you can use Azure Monitor, Azure Resource Graph, and Azure Cost Management & Billing. These tools can help you track resource usage and identify resources that are no longer in use, so that you can delete them and optimize resource utilization.
How effective is your reserved instance strategy?
Reserved Instances in Azure are a pricing option for virtual machines (VMs) and SQL databases that provides a significant discount compared to pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing. Reserved Instances allow you to commit to a one- or three-year term for specific virtual machine (VM) instances, Azure App Services or SQL databases and in return, receive a discount on the total cost of the instances.
By reserving instances, you can reduce the costs of running your applications and services on Azure, making it more cost-effective for long-term usage. Additionally, Reserved Instances provide the flexibility to change the size or series of your reserved instances, as well as to cancel your reservation at any time.
It’s important to note that Reserved Instances apply to a specific combination of virtual machine size, series, and region, so it’s essential to choose the right combination of resources to maximize cost savings.
It is often a good idea to start with pay-as-you-go resources and reserve instances once a reliable baseline of resources are identified. A good combination is to purchase reserve instances for baseline workloads such as 1 app service instance running all of the time, and use pay-as-you-go for additional app service instances required during a temporary scale-out event.
To purchase a Reserved Instance, you can use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell. After purchasing a Reserved Instance, you will be charged a fixed rate for the duration of the reservation term, regardless of any changes in the pay-as-you-go prices during that time.
Have you optimized your storage to reduce cost?
There are several techniques that can be used to optimize storage in Azure, including:
- Use tiered storage: Azure offers different storage tiers, such as hot, cool, and archive, that are optimized for different access patterns. By choosing the right storage tier for your data, you can reduce storage costs and improve performance.
- Schedule storage tiering: By scheduling storage tiering, you can automatically move data to a lower-cost storage tier such as cool or archive storage when it’s no longer frequently accessed.
- Use Azure Blob storage: Azure Blob storage is a cost-effective solution for unstructured data, such as images, videos, and documents. It is optimized for handling large amounts of unstructured data and is ideal for use cases such as backups, archives, and big data analytics.
- Use Azure Disks: Azure Disks provide high-performance, durable block-level storage for virtual machines. You can optimize storage performance by choosing the appropriate disk type for your workload, such as premium or standard disk.
- Use Azure Files: Azure Files provide shared access to files and folders over the SMB protocol. Azure Files can be used to store and share data within an organization, and can be used as a replacement for traditional file servers.
- Enable compression: Enable compression on your data to reduce the amount of storage required and to improve data transfer performance. Azure Blob storage supports Gzip compression, which can be used to reduce the size of data.
- Use storage snapshots: Storage snapshots are point-in-time copies of a disk that can be used to recover data in the event of data loss. By regularly taking snapshots, you can reduce the risk of data loss and minimize the impact of a data disaster.
- Use Azure Backup: Azure Backup is a cloud-based backup solution that can be used to back up data from on-premises, cloud, and virtual machine environments. Azure Backup can help you optimize storage by reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored and improving the efficiency of data backup and recovery operations.
How have you configured scheduling to save money?
Scheduling in Azure can help you reduce costs by allowing you to control when and how resources are used, and to turn off or deallocate resources when they are not needed.
Here are some ways you can use scheduling in Azure to reduce cost:
- Schedule storage tiering: Azure offers different storage tiers, such as hot, cool, and archive, that are optimized for different access patterns. By scheduling storage tiering, you can automatically move data to a lower-cost storage tier when it’s no longer frequently accessed.
- Schedule resource scaling: By scaling resources up or down based on demand, you can ensure that you are only paying for the resources you need. For example, you can use Azure Autoscale to automatically scale virtual machines based on CPU utilization, and then deallocate virtual machines when demand decreases.
- Schedule virtual machine shutdowns: By scheduling virtual machine shutdowns during off-peak hours, you can save money on compute resources that are not being used. You can use Azure Automation to create a runbook that automatically shuts down virtual machines on a schedule.
- Schedule snapshots: By scheduling snapshots of virtual machine disks, you can save money on storage while ensuring that you have a reliable backup of your data. You can use Azure Backup or Azure Snapshots to create a schedule for taking snapshots of your virtual machine disks.
Summary
It’s important to note that cost optimization is an ongoing process, and it’s important to regularly monitor and review your Azure usage and costs to ensure that you’re getting the most value from your Azure resources. By implementing these best practices and using Azure’s cost management tools, you can gain better visibility into your costs, identify and address cost issues, and make more informed decisions about your Azure resources.