8.1 Describe factors that can affect costs in Azure
Azure shitfs development costs from the capital expense (CapEx) of building out and maintaining infrastructure and facilities to an operational expense (OpEx) of renting infrastructure as you need it.
The OpEx cost can be impacted by:
- Resource type:
The type of resources, the settings, and the Azure region will have an impact on the resource costs.
Ex) With storage account, you specify a type such as blob, performance tier, access tier, redundancy settings, and a region.
Ex) With VM, specifying OS, processor, number of cores, attached storage, network interface
- Consumption: Pay-as-you-go
- Maintenance: By keeping an eye on your resources and making sure you are not keeping around resources that are no longer needed, you help to control cloud costs.
- Geography:
Azure infrastructure is distributed globally, which enables you to deploy your services centrally or closest to your customers.
With tihs global deployment comes global pricing ifferences: cost of power, labor, taxes and fees vary per location.
- Network Traffic:
Billing zones are a factor in determining the cost of some Azure services.
Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure datacenters and some inbound data transfers (data going into Azure datacenters) are free and for outbaound data transfers (data leaving Azure datacenters), data transfer pricing is based on zones.
- Subscription type:
Some Azure subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs.
- Azure Marketplace:
Azure Marketplace lets you purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors.
When you purchase products through Azure Marketplace, you may pay for not only the Azure services that you are using, but also the services or expertise of the third-party vendor.
8.2 Compare the Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership calculators
The pricing calculator and the total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator are two calculators that help you understand potential Azure expenses.
Two calculators have a different purpose.
Pricing calculator
The pricing calculator is designed to give you an estimated cost for provisioning resources in Azure.
You can get an estimate for individual resources, build out a soultion, or use an example scenario to see an estimate of the Azure spend.
The pricing calculator's focus is on the cost of provisioned resources in Azure.
The pricing calculator is for information purposes only and the prices are only an estimate.
Nothing is provisioned when you add resources to the pricing calculator, and you won't be charged for any services you select.
With the pricing calculator, you can estimate the cost of any provisioned resources, including compute, storage, and associated network costs.
You can even account for different storage options like storage type, access tier, and redundancy.
TCO calculator
The TCO calculator is designed to help you compare the costs for running an on-premises infrastructure compared to an Azure Cloud infrastructure.
With the TCO calculator, you enter your current infrastructure configuration, including servers, databases, storage, and outbound network traffic.
The TCO calculator then compares the anticipated costs for your current environment with an Azure environment supporting the same infrastructure requirements.
8.3 Describe the Microsoft Cost Management Tool
You can provision resources rapidly to meet a sudden demand, or to test out a new feature, or on accident.
If you accidentally provision new resources, you may not notice it before your invoice → Cost Management.
Cost Management
Cost Management provides the ability to quickly check Azure resource costs, create alerts based on resource spend, and create budgets that can be used to automate management of resources.
Cost analysis is a subset of Cost Management that provides a quick visual for your Azure costs.
Cost alerts from Cost Management service
Three types of alerts that may show up:
1. Budget alerts
Budget alerts notify you when spending reaches or exceeds the amount defined in the alert condition.
2. Credit alerts
Credit alerts notify you when your Azure credit monetary commitments are consumed (monetary commitments are for organizations with Enterprise Agreements (EAs).
Credit alerts are generated automatically at 90% and at 100% of your Azure credit balance.
3. Department spending quota alerts
Department spending quota alerts notify you when department spending reaches a fixed threshold of the quota.
Whenever a threshold is met, it generates an email to department owners, and appears in cost alerts.
8.4 Describe the purpose of tags
As your cloud usage grows, it's important to stay organized and one way to organize related resources is to place them in their own subscriptions and to use resource groups to manage related resources.
Resource tags are another way to organize resources, and tags provide extra information or metadata about your resources.
This metadata is useful for:
- Resource management: Tags enable you to locate and act on resources that are associated with specific workloads, environments, business units and owners.
- Cost management and optimization: Tags enable you to group resources so that you can report on costs, track budgets and forecast estimated cost.
- Operations management: Tags enable you to group resources according to how critical their availability is to your business, which helps to formulate service-level agreements (SLAs).
- Security: Tags enable you to classify data by its security level, such as public or confidential.
- Governance and regulatory compliance: Tags enable you to identify resources that align with governance or regulatory compliance requirements.
- Workload optimization and automation: Tags help to visualize all the resources that are in complex deployments
8.5 Module assessment
1. What Azure fature can help stay organized and track usage based on metadata associated with resources?
Tags
2. What's the best method to estimate the cost of migrating to the cloud while incurring minimal costs?
Use the Total Cost of Ownership calculator to estimate expected costs
댓글