One of the most frequently preferred reasons for Microsoft Azure , which is at the forefront among cloud service providers with its features such as flexibility and scalability in its ever-increasing number of services, is to reduce total cost of ownership. We can say that cost analysis and management is an important topic in the Azure life cycle. Let's examine ways to better manage and optimize our Azure cost;
There may be different pricing for Azure resources depending on Azure regions. Although we prefer the points closest to our OnPrem data center as a general approach, it is also useful to take a look at the pricing details. For example, hourly pricing for a virtual server with the same configuration (DS1 v2) is $0.116 in the Northern European Region and $0.191 in Southern France.
Turn it off when not in use; You can gain a cost advantage by turning off the systems you do not use outside working hours. While you can perform this process manually, you can also perform it in different scenarios using the auto shutdown attribute in the virtual server properties or with Azure Automation.
You can manually resize your virtual servers according to your changing workloads, but when you define your virtual servers in a scale set, you also have the powerful option of commissioning a new server behind the load balancer/application gateway when the CPU value reaches a certain threshold value.
⦁ With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can use your existing Windows Server Licenses on virtual servers in Azure.
⦁ In the Azure Market Place, you can find ready-made images for many operating systems and different applications from different vendors, from Citrix to Barracuda. It may be an advantageous option instead of purchasing an application license and installing it on an empty virtual server.
⦁ Instead of creating virtual servers for SMB file shares, you can take advantage of the Azure Storage service, which serves as PaaS; Thus, you benefit from data backup and virtual server costs.
⦁ Choose Azure Application Services as PaaS instead of Azure Virtual Machines; so you can run web applications, API applications and mobile applications without operating system costs.
⦁ Delete resources you don't use. When you delete your Azure virtual servers, your disks on the virtual server are not automatically deleted. You can use the scripts in this article to detect and delete disks that are not in use: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/find-unattached-disks
⦁ Monitor your Azure costs; You can monitor your expenses according to your resources on the Azure Portal, use them to tag attributes such as project and department, and perform detailed analysis with Azure Cost Management.