Introduction
While working with public cloud-like Azure, AWS, or GCP, we all know that the pricing of the cloud providers is being charged based on the usage. Since the pricing model is based on pay per usage, it is recommended for a cloud developer to proactively monitor the cloud resources and try to find potential options to reduce the cost with automation.
Cost optimization for Azure Cloud Resources
Proactive monitoring of Azure Advisor
The azure advisor is a built-in, intelligent feature from Microsoft. It provides you recommendations with respect to various categories and your usage,
- Cost
- Security
- Operational Excellence
- Performance
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You can monitor Azure Advisor recommendations from the Azure portal using the above screen.
Configure Cost Budget Alerts
When we start working with cloud resources, most enterprise organizations have a cost budget in their mind. So, it is really good practice to create cost budget alerts either monthly or quarterly. When cost budget is enabled and alert creation will be activated, automated email alerts will be sent as soon as a certain amount of threshold has been reached.
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Auto-shutdown feature for Azure VMs
While working with non-native azure resources, you might work with Azure VMs. It can either be windows VM or Linux VM. The cost of the Azure VMs will be charged even though it is not being used after business hours and during weekends. So, It is recommended to enable the auto-shutdown feature for Azure VM which will shut down VM automatically at a specific time and start the VM the next day automatically. So, organizations can save a huge amount of cost after enabling this feature.
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Storage Life Cycle for cost reduction.
While working with Azure Cloud, the team uses azure blob storage or azure data lake storage to store the data. Azure storage itself provides in-built features with the storage life cycle. Azure storage has three tiers,
- Hot Tier - Rapid access to the data
- Cold Tier - Less frequent access to the data
- Cool Tier - Data that is not required access, accessing data once in a year
We can create a storage policy to automatically move data from one tier to another tier based on the data access.
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Consolidate Idle resources and remove unused resources
It is also a good practice to proactively monitor all the resources deployed and used inside the resource group. Try to minimize the configurations based on your workload if required. If there are resources that are not being used, it is better to remove those resources.
Select right-sized azure services and compute services
When we work with Azure, we can choose VM with different sizes or we can also create databricks compute services with various runtime. Based on the workload, it is recommended to determine the right size of Azure resources to reduce the cost of the Azure service.
Use the advantage of Hybrid
While working with Azure, If you already have an existing SQL Server license, you can use Azure Hybrid to avoid any extra license cost for the SQL Server.
Conclusion
In this blog, we explored the various cost optimization techniques while working with Azure Resources. We can save a good amount of cost with best practices of using such cost optimization techniques.