Provision with optimization
When provisioning resources, you'd ideally make them as efficient as possible from the start. Resource demands and technical requirements can change over time, but if you start with a workload that was optimized for cost when you initially designed it, it'll set you up for success down the line. Let's look at some ways to provision your resources with cost optimization in mind.
Select appropriate service tiers and sizes
When you're provisioning resources on the cloud, selecting the right SKU or tier will have a direct impact on the Azure service's capabilities, capacity, and performance. This selection is tied directly to cost. Carefully evaluate the workload requirements for your application and select the SKU or tier that matches your resource requirements.
There's a wide variety of virtual machine types to choose from when you're provisioning for VM-based workloads. Each VM SKU comes with an assigned amount of CPU, memory, and storage. Assess the resource requirements for your workload and select the VM SKU that most closely matches your needs.
Provisioning VM sizes can often be challenging. You might be deploying for your maximum workload, even though your application needs that capacity for only a portion of its running time. Choosing a VM size is not a permanent decision. You can modify your VM size at any time, but in most cases it will require you to restart your VM.
Pay only for consumption
Many cloud services provide a consumption billing model. With consumption models, you pay for only the amount of transactions, CPU time, or run time of your application. This can bring cost savings and efficiency to your application, because you aren't paying for the resources to run your application when it's not being used. Let's look at a few examples of Azure services that have a consumption cost model:
Azure Functions is an event-driven, serverless compute platform that provides a consumption plan. When you're using the consumption plan, you're charged for compute resources only when your functions are running. Billing is based on the number of executions, the length of time running, and the amount of memory used. As an added benefit, your function scales automatically. Instances of the Azure Functions host are dynamically added and removed based on the number of incoming events. Function execution times out after a configurable period of time.
Azure Logic Apps is a service that helps you create automated integration workflows in the cloud. The Logic Apps service provides a consumption tier where you only pay per execution of a connector.
Azure SQL Database is a service that allows you to store relational data in the cloud. Azure SQL Database has a serverless tier where you can reduce your costs by pausing the database when it's not in use. Azure SQL Database serverless is price-performance optimized for single databases with intermittent, unpredictable usage patterns that can afford some delay in compute warm-up after idle usage periods.
Azure API Management is a service that provides centralized API administration, proxy, and deployment. API Management has a consumption tier that bills per execution, and will scale out automatically as requests change over time. The consumption tier enables the service to be used in a serverless fashion, with instant provisioning, automated scaling, built-in high availability, and pay-per-action pricing.
Use spot instances for low-priority workloads
You can use spot VMs to take advantage of unused capacity on Azure at a significant cost savings. At any point when Azure needs the capacity back, the Azure infrastructure will evict spot VMs. Spot VMs are great for workloads that can handle interruptions, like batch processing jobs, development/test environments, and large compute workloads.
Take advantage of reserved instances
Azure reservations help you save money by committing to one-year or three-year plans for multiple products. Committing to one of these plans gets you a discount on the resources you use. Reservations can reduce your resource costs up to 72 percent on pay-as-you-go prices. Reservations provide a billing discount and don't affect the runtime state of your resources. After you purchase a reservation, the discount automatically applies to matching resources.
Reservations are available for services such as:
- Windows and Linux virtual machines
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Cosmos DB
- Azure Synapse Analytics
- Azure Storage
If you have consistent resource usage that supports reservations, buying a reservation provides you the option of reducing your costs. For example, when you continuously run instances of a service without a reservation, you're charged at pay-as-you-go rates. When you buy a reservation, you immediately get the reservation discount. The resources are no longer charged at the pay-as-you-go rates.
Use managed services when possible
Whenever possible, take advantage of combining lower resource costs and lower operational costs by using managed services. These services come with lower operational costs because you don't need to patch and manage the underlying infrastructure and services. Deploying applications on VMs comes with the administration and maintenance of the operating system, as well as any layered software.
Azure SQL Database is a great example of a managed service. You can deploy a single or pooled database or a managed instance, and each of these is fully managed. You don't need to patch the underlying database software, and operational items like backup are built in and provided for you.
Azure App Service is another example of a managed service that is designed to host web applications. Rather than deploying and managing VMs to host your web applications, you can deploy your applications directly to App Service and dramatically reduce the amount of effort that's required to maintain infrastructure.
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