Does the fear of increased costs keep you from moving your on-premise solution to the cloud? Or do you feel that you are paying too much for your current cloud solution? I am a cheapskate and I thoroughly enjoy paying as little as I can on my cloud services usage. Microsoft Azure is a great platform to use when creating your next cloud native solution. But maybe you have head or felt that it can be a tad expensive? Let us change this! There are a whole lot of services to choose from on Microsoft Azure. Some are very expensive, and some are cheap. The same services can be cheap for high usage, but expensive for low usage and vice-versa. So how do you know which services to use? And how do I set up my solution so that it as cheap as it can be for my usage? Is the service that advertises a large generous free tier, or the one that has just received a new consumption-based pricing model, the service cheapest for you in the long run? In this talk we will compare some of the more known services against each other using my "Stinginess-scale". I will show some simple changes that can be done to some of the more known reference architectures to make them cheaper. And share some of my best tips & tricks on how to architecture cheap solutions on Microsoft Azure. I hope that you will leave this talk inspired and with new knowledge on how to save money on your current or next cloud solution!

1. A cheapskate's guide to
Azure
Øredev 2022, Malmö
Karl Løland
Cloud Evangelist at Webstep
@etroll

2. Me
Karl Løland
Cloud Evangelist at Webstep
@etroll
Enjoys talking with techies at conferences
Used Microsoft Azure heavily since 2009
Huge baseball fan!
Bit of a nerd
Consultant

3. Agenda
Intro – Why?
Common cost saving tips & tricks
«Hidden» costs
Thoughprocess – Stingyness scale
Possible quick changes to arhitectures

4. Why I created this talk
Photo by Maegan Martin

5. Why I
created this
talk
Photo by Jp Valery

6. Cloud costs can be difficult
No silver bullet!
Different solutions, different needs
Hidden costs
Inspire devs to think about cost

7. How does Azure compare to AWS/GCP?

8. What about smaller providers?

9. Common
cost saving
tips
Photo by micheile dot com

10. Meassure twice cut once
Photo by Fleur at unsplash.com

11. Azure
Pricing
Calculator
Photo by Nick Morrison

12. Remove unnused resources
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski

13. Azure Advisor

14. Make use of Azure Dev/Test pricing
Photo by Kaleidico

15. Azure
Dev/Test
pricing

16. Move away from VMs
Photo by Aron Visuals
Photo by Ryu Orn

17. Move away
from VMs
Virtual Networks
Azure
Container
Instances
Azure
AppService
Plan
Azure
SQL Server
Azure
Functions

18. Azure Spot VMs
Photo by Aron Visuals

19. Azure Spot
VMs Spot Virtual Machine Spot Virtual Machine
Scale Sets
Virtual Machine Virtual Machine
Scale Sets

20. Scale down resources
Photo by Mathieu Stern

21. Scale down
resources
Resources
Alerts
Actions
Azure Monitor
Metrics
Azure
Runbooks
Logic Apps

22. Are you using the best pricing tier?
Photo by Jukan Tateisi

23. App
Service
Pricing
Tiers
100 ACU & 1,75GB for ~600 NOK/Month – 6 NOK/ACU
210 ACU & 3,5GB for ~700 NOK/Month – 3,4 NOK/ACU
>390 ACU & 8GB for ~800 NOK/Month – 2 NOK/ACU

24. Azure Virtual Machine SKUs

25. Consumption based pricing

26. Consumption
based pricing
Cost
Time
Usage

27. Consumption
based pricing
Time
Cost
Usage
Fixed PaaS or infrastructure Consumption

28. Azure Hybrid Benefits
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya

29. Azure
Hybrid
Benefits

30. Azure Reservations

31. Azure
Reservations

32. Azure Savings Plan for Compute
Photo by cottonbro at Pexels.com

33. Azure
savings
plan for
compute

34. Combine them
Azure
Reservations
Azure Hybrid
Benefit
Azure Savings Plan
for Compute

35. «Hidden»
Costs
Photo by Alice Pasqual
Photo by Marc Zimmer

36. Data transfer costs
Photo by Thomas Jensen

37. Data
transfer
costs
Data into Azure
Free
Not free
Data out of Azure

38. Data
transfer
costs North Europe
Norway East
Not free

39. Data
transfer
costs

40. Data storage costs

41. Data
storage
costs
Disks still costs money when VM is off

42. Data
storage
costs
Disks still costs money when VM is off
Functions uses Storage Accounts
Durable functions reads and writes

43. Data
storage
costs
Redundancy is not free

44. Azure Monitor
Photo by Scott Webb

45. Azure
Monitor
Median data ingestion is around 3GB
Alerts, notifications, and queries cost extra
Data sent to 3rd party has a cost per GB
Analytics Logs is 3.6x more expensive than basic logs
Do not send unnecessary logs or metrics
Application Insight logs is also 3.6x more expensive

46. Services cost
reviews
Photo by Jason Goodman

47. My «stingyness scale»
Photo by Mick Haupt
Ease of cost
estimations
Production
usage price
Consumption
based pricing
Free tier Tiered pricing
model
Is it a good
product

48. Azure
Cosmos
DB
Photo by Alice Pasqual

49. Estimating
Price

50. Pricing
Model and
Tiers
Limited free tier
Standard provisioned throughput
Auto scaled provisioned throughput
Consumption based pricing tier
vCores (compute and memory)

51. Pricing
1800 1800
2400
994
14700
4399
kr -
kr 2,000.00
kr 4,000.00
kr 6,000.00
kr 8,000.00
kr 10,000.00
kr 12,000.00
kr 14,000.00
kr 16,000.00
100% Usage 24% Avg usage
Cost
per
month
in
NOK
2000 RU/s – 200GB Storage – Cost per month
Manual Autoscaled Serverless

52. Alternatives to: Cosmos DB
Azure SQL
Server
Azure
Database for
PostgreSQL
Azure Table
Storage

53. Alternatives
pricing
1800 1800
2400
994
14700
4399
15901774
506
kr -
kr 2,000.00
kr 4,000.00
kr 6,000.00
kr 8,000.00
kr 10,000.00
kr 12,000.00
kr 14,000.00
kr 16,000.00
100% Usage 24% Avg usage Alternatives
Cost
per
month
in
NOK
2000 RU/s – 200GB Storage – Cost per month
Manual Autoscaled Serverless SQL Server 100 DTU PostgreSQL - Gen5 2vCore Table Storage

54. Summary
Ease of cost
estimations
10
1
Production
usage price
10
8
Consumption
based pricing
10
1
Free tier 10
3
Tiered pricing
model
A
N
Is it a good
product
10
8

55. Architecting
cheaper
cloud
solutions
Photo by Alice Pasqual
Photo by Chris Nguyen

56. Where do I
start?
Costant and known usage Variable or unknown usage
Cunsumption based
still cheaper than cheapest
fixed price alternative?
No
Yes

57. Where do I
start?
Costant and known usage Variable or unknown usage
Cunsumption based
still cheaper than cheapest
fixed price alternative?
No
Yes

58. Where do I
start?
Costant and known usage Variable or unknown usage
Cunsumption based
still cheaper than cheapest
fixed price alternative?
No
Consumption based
crosses fixed price alternative
Yes

59. Compute alternatives
Functions App Service
Plan
Container
Instances
Virtual
Machines
AKS
Prefferable – Often in combination Can I avoid?

60. Databases alternatives
Prefferable Can I avoid?
PostgreSQL
Table
Storage
SQL Server Cosmos DB SQL Managed
Instance
Do I need?

61. Examples
Azure
Monitor
Power BI
Stream
Analytics
Dashboard
Data source 1:
Fare data
Data source 2:
Trip data
Azure Event
Hubs
Azure Event
Hubs
Azure
Cosmos DB
Microsoft
Azure
Stream processing with Azure Stream Analytics

62. Examples
Azure
Monitor
Power BI
Stream
Analytics
Dashboard
Data source 1:
Fare data
Data source 2:
Trip data
Azure Event
Hubs
Azure Event
Hubs
Azure Table
Storage
Microsoft
Azure
Stream processing with Azure Stream Analytics

63. Examples
Image classification on Azure
Web or mobile
front-end
API / event
processor
Data storage
Event trigger
Microsoft
Azure
Azure
Functions
Storage
account
Computer
Vision API
Azure
Event Grid
Azure Blob
Storage
Image uploads
Azure
Cosmos DB

64. Examples
Image classification on Azure
Web or mobile
front-end
API / event
processor
Data storage
Event trigger
Microsoft
Azure
Azure
Functions
Storage
account
Computer
Vision API
Azure
Event Grid
Azure Blob
Storage
Image uploads
Azure Table
Storage
Azure Blob
Storage

65. Examples
Design review powered by mixed reality
Microsoft
Azure

66. Examples
Design review powered by mixed reality
Microsoft
Azure
App Service
Plan

67. Where do I
go from
here?
Photo by Nick Morrison

68. Learn by
doing on
Microsoft
Learn

69. Azure
Pricing
Calculator
Photo by Nick Morrison

70. Summary
Common tips and tricks for reducing costs
«Hidden» storage and bandwidth costs
Mental tools to compare services for costs
Minor changes in architectures to reduce cost

71. Thank you!
Learn by doing on
Microsoft Learn
Karl Løland
Consultant
@etroll