5 exceptional ways to undertake Azure Cost Optimization for your specific business needs!

Azure cost optimization is crucial for those using Azure as their cloud computing services provider. Most companies, big and small, have realized that the cloud is the future of workspaces and that a lot of time, money and energy can be saved by moving to the cloud. In a nutshell, it makes the workspace efficient. But this efficiency comes at a cost. Unless that is, you learn how to optimize the cloud and reduce costs. This article seeks to teach you just that.

Steps related to Azure Cost Optimization

If you follow the below steps, you will be able to optimize cloud, save costs and increase profits!

1. In-built Tutorial

Azure is unique as it provides an in-built tutorial and guide to help you optimize the cloud service it is providing. This service is known as the Azure Advisor and it exists solely to help you optimize and improve efficiency by identifying unused and idle resources. But to use this, a few prerequisites must be met. Firstly, you must have a supported account type and must have read access (at the least) of the scopes to view cost data. Lastly, you must have active virtual machines with a minimum of 14 days of activity logged in them. Once fulfilled:

· Sign in to Azure and view Recommendations:

If you are subscribed to the Azure Service, you will have access to the Azure portal, where you must log in. Once done, select the scope that you want to optimize and click on Advisor Recommendations. If you want to view recommendations for a Management Group, select the scope required and click on Cost Analysis. You will be provided with a list of recommendations which identify inefficiencies and recommend purchases. It will also show you the annual savings achieved if the recommendations are acted upon. Along with this, the Impact category informs you of the other impacts achieved upon completion.

· Act on Recommendations:

Azure advisor considers activities that utilize less than 5% CPU or less than 7MB Data a week as low-utilization virtual machines. These settings are configurable. You can shut down these services directly from the recommendations list by clicking on the “shutdown
underutilized virtual machines” recommendation. You can view each virtual machine in detail and determine how you want to proceed. Shutting down a few Virtual Machines will not, however, achieve the potential annual savings as displayed as this will be possible only if all Virtual Machines are shut down. In any case, there will be some savings invariably upon shutdown.

· Verify:

When resizing of a virtual machine is complete, you should receive a notification indicating the name of the virtual machine downsized and the size it has been resized to. This is the verification that the resizing was successful. As mentioned earlier, this in and of itself will not save a large amount of money. This practice must be undertaken regularly and the recommendations must be followed to the closest degree possible. If you do all this, over time, your savings will increase and your yearly bill will definitely be lower. It also frees up the system and increases the performance.

2. Reserved Instances

Reserved instances are generally great way to save a lot of money when doing tasks that are predictable in nature and are unlikely to change size and requirements over time. Windows introduced Reserved Instances for Azure on a general basis quite recently and if your task involves the use of virtual machines that are static and predictable, you should certainly consider purchasing a reserved instance as it I known to save up to 70% of the costs. These reserved instances may be purchased for a 1-3 year term and the payment must be made upfront for the whole time period.

3. Azure Hybrid

If you have made an investment in windows server licences, you will be eligible for what is known as Azure Hybrid Benefits. When these benefits are applied, you can use Virtual Machines on Azure, but you will not be charged at the Azure Rate, but in the Linux Rate. However, to be eligible, your licence must cover software assurance. There are various deployment limits, such as application only on two 8 core devices or one 16 core device, so make sure to read the conditions before application. Deploying these benefits are easy and can be disabled also just as easily.

4. Cloudyn

Azure Cost Management was recently named as Cloudyn. This, much like Azure Advisor, it’s a free service that analyses the workload and provides recommendations, which may include right sizing virtual machines or purchasing reserved instances. It also provides many tools to extrapolate, budget and evaluate costs incurred on Azure. With the help of this tool, you will know exactly where your money is going. This tool is free when used in Azure and is available as a paid version if you want to evaluate the performance of other providers. IT gives you a great deal of control over your spending.

5. Shut Down Virtual Machines

Very often, virtual machines are purchased and deployed for a test or particular task, but these virtual machines are not removed or resized after the completion of the task. They keep running in the background and drive costs up. It is crucial to clean up such Virtual Machines. Similarly, there are also Virtual Machines that work only at particular time periods. You can find out what these hours are and program them to shut done automatically when they are not going to be used. You can also resize these virtual machines to use up less data, which drives costs down.

Final Words

Microsoft Azure is a high quality cloud service provider. The cloud service provided by them is filled to the brim with possibilities to optimize it and run costs. So much so that they themselves provide tools which aid you in this process. But it is up to you to utilize these processes and understanding what processes are driving up costs. If you undertake this effort and resize your processes and utilize offers provided by Microsoft, you will very easily be able to drive your costs down, not just by reducing data consumption, but also by increasing productivity of your system.