Saving Money When First Using Microsoft Azure
cloudThing are a Microsoft Gold Partner who specialise in Digital Transformation.
cloudThing are a Microsoft Gold Partner who specialise in Digital Transformation.
We’re always happy to talk how the above can help an organisation catapult themselves ahead of the competition but the one thing they all have in common is what we’ll be touching on today… Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure is the foundation of all of these, the foundation in the clouds.
It’s the environment in which all of these awesome cloud technologies are built, hosted and deployed.
As such, over the years, cloudThing have picked up quite a few tips and tricks for keeping Azure Hosting costs down for our clients. Tips and tricks such as…
The first ting almost everyone forgets when using their first VM (Virtual Machine… or computer in the cloud) is to shut it down, or at least, to shut it down correctly.
VM’s are charged at different rates depending on numerous factors but unfortunately there isn’t an easy ‘off switch’ to stop you being charged… it has to be shut down using the correct processes otherwise… your costs will mount up, even if it’s not being used!
To take an Azure VM to a point where you won’t be charged anymore you need to make sure it’s brought to what’s known as a Stopped (Deallocated) State.
Where most people go wrong is assuming the VM can be switched off with the VM itself. In fact that will only bring the machine to a ‘stopped’ state… but you’ll still be charged for it.
To prevent that from happing, a user needs to head to the Azure Management Portal, find the Virtual Machine blade for the VM in use and click shutdown there.
Shutting down the VM like that however (we should probably point out here) will stop you from being charged but… you’ll also lose any and all resources currently allocated to that VM, including any virtual IP you’ve associated with it. If you want to prevent that, make sure the Cloud Service that’s supporting all your VM’s has at least one virtual machine still running in a non-Stopped (Deallocated) state. Yes, you’ll still be getting billed for that single VM but it also means you can keep hold of all your virtual IP.
When first migrating to Azure or when pushing anything new live in Azure, it’s normal to test it out in a staging environment… this avoids downtime and lets you test things thoroughly before anything goes fully live.
However… you pay the same price for a staging VM as you do for a live one and you’d be shocked at the number of devs who sometimes forget to correctly close down their staging environments once their solution goes live!
Not sure this has been done? The view in your Azure Portal can be edited to show both staging and live environments and which, if any, are still in use or need shutting down.
Whilst it wont be suitable for everyone, Microsoft does offer rather large discounts to start-ups using Azure for the first time… these are always worth checking out and are a great way to save cash in the early days of a business.
An often-misunderstood aspect of Microsoft Azure is their regional pricing structures. Not all regions will have the same price but, just because you’re in one region, doesn’t mean you have to purchase that regions Azure.
It’s obviously not as simple as that (unfortunately), as many experts agree that locating your VM’s and other resources as close to your staff, clients or end-user’s region as possible is best practice… but that’s not to say with the right advice it can’t be done.
Those pricing differences aren’t something you’ll see on a Microsoft pricing sheet and it’s likely you’ll need to speak to a licensing partner to truly benefit from them but if your Azure subscription is high it’s well worth looking into.
Another great way to avoid the costs of VM’s that haven’t been shut down is to do a lot of your testing in DevTestLabs.
It’s a great bit of software for creating test servers to practice on, especially if you only need them during working hours as schedules can be imposed to shut everything down at, say, 5:30 each day, saving time and more importantly costs.
Oh, and the best bit? It’s a free to use tool – the only cost is the VM you’ll be running the software on!
A common phrase you’ll hear when first migrating to the cloud is ‘lift and shift’, literally taking all your current assets and dropping them into Microsoft Azure. That’s by far the most common method for getting to the cloud for most people.
Just because it’d the most common however, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best choice for your organisation. There’s a lot of complexities involved that should be talked over with a migration partner but for some organisations a PaaS solution could well be worth considering.
Many people when first migrating always over provision their VM’s. Platform-as-a-Service can help solve that.
The Azure App Service allows organisations to host web apps, background processes, API apps and more by utilising PaaS.
As a deployed Platform Service it means you can create an App Service Plan which would represent two or three servers and then just pack it with as many web applications as you like.
As you can no doubt imagine that has huge cost saving implications over paying for an entire server per app (that may only occasionally be called on to do something).
The Azure App Service was deliberately built on a fully managed VM so for those that make use of it there’s no OS, patches or other platform updates for organisations using it to worry about which also massively decreases the maintenance costs of your applications and their associated workloads.
Whilst you’ll know the sector you operate in a lot better than we will we’re willing to bet that most of your Apps have busier and slower times throughout the day, week, month or year. If you enable it Azure has auto -scaling built in so you can save your business money during the slower periods.
Cloud Services, App Services and VM Scale sets all support auto-scaling so it should definitely be part of your PaaS strategy.
If you’ve a big project to undertake relating to migrating to Azure then you may not realise it but there are Azure discounts available to help fund the project available from Microsoft if you use a Microsoft partner.
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