How to optimize your Azure workload costs

The economic challenges posed by the global health pandemic continue to affect every organization around the world. During this difficult time, cost optimization has become an especially critical topic. Recently, we provided an overview of how to approach cost optimization on Microsoft Azure, which laid out three focus areas to help you get the most value out of your Azure investment: understanding and forecasting your costs, optimizing your workload costs, and controlling your costs.

Today, we’ll dive more deeply into the second focus area—how you can optimize your Azure workloads costs—and show you how guidance in the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, tools like Azure Advisor, and offers like the Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reservations can help you operate more efficiently on Azure and save.

Design workloads for cost optimization using best practices from the Azure Well-Architected Framework

The Azure Well-Architected Framework is designed to help you build and deploy cloud workloads with confidence, using actionable and simple to use deep technical content, assessments, and reference architectures based on proven industry best practices. You can assess workloads against the five pillars of the Azure Well-Architected Framework cloud design—cost optimization, reliability, security, performance efficiency, and operational excellence—to help you focus on the right activities and to ensure you optimize workloads and proactively meet business needs.

The cost optimization section of the Azure Well-Architected Framework is all about managing costs to get the most value out of your Azure workloads and covers:

• Cost management principles, a series of important considerations that can help you achieve both business objectives and cost justification.
• Cost best practices for design, provisioning, monitoring, and optimization.
• Trade-offs between cost and other pillars like reliability and performance.

A great way to get started with the Azure Well-Architected Framework is by taking the Azure Well-Architected Review. This review examines your workload against the best practices defined by the pillars of reliability, cost optimization, operational excellence, security, and performance efficiency. You can choose to take the review for any or all of the pillars, so you can start by focusing on cost optimization, if you prefer.

Optimize your Azure resources with best practice recommendations from Azure Advisor

Your workloads are composed of resources, so configuring your resources according to the latest Azure best practices is critical to ensuring your workloads are cost optimized. Azure Advisor is a free service that helps you optimize your already-deployed Azure resources for cost, security, performance, reliability, and operational excellence. Advisor is aligned with the Azure Well-Architected Framework, but is targeted at the resource level instead of the workload level. Advisor’s recommendations are personalized to your Azure environment based on your resource telemetry and configurations.

Examples of Advisor cost recommendations include rightsizing underutilized or shutting down unused resources, buying reserved instances to save over pay-as-you-go costs, and using storage lifecycle management. Our full list of Advisor cost recommendations is available.

Advisor offers several features to make it faster and easier to optimize your resources. Quick Fix enables one-click bulk remediation of recommendations, so you can multi-select resources you’d like to remediate. Click Quick Fix, and Advisor takes care of the rest. You can configure Advisor to display only the recommendations that mean the most to you, such as those for your production subscriptions and resource groups. Advisor alerts notify you when you have new recommendations, and Advisor recommendation digests remind you about available recommendations you haven’t remediated yet.

Visit the Advisor documentation to learn more and get started remediating your cost recommendations.

Save big on Azure by leveraging your existing on-premises licensing investment with the Azure Hybrid Benefit

The Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that lets you bring your Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises licenses with Software Assurance or subscriptions to Azure and save up to 85 percent compared to standard pay as-you-go rates,1 so you only pay for the compute costs on Azure. You can apply these savings across Azure SQL and Azure Dedicated Host.

License mobility benefits offered by Azure include the ability to bring your Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to the cloud, leverage SQL Server licensing in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) environments, and gain additional licensing benefits, including 180-day dual use rights of your licenses, both on-premises and in Azure. For your heavily-virtualized workloads, you get four vCPUs of Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance for each core of SQL Server Enterprise.

These unique advantages plus additional benefits such as, free fail-over servers licensing for SQL Server disaster recovery and free extended security updates, make Azure the best-in-class cloud for Windows Server and SQL Server.

Check out the Azure Hybrid Benefit Documentation for more technical tutorials and resources.

Reserve upfront and pay less with Azure Reservations

Receive a discount on your Azure services by purchasing Azure Reservations, which is a one-year or three-year commitment to specific Azure services. Giving us visibility into your one-year or three-year resource needs in advance allows us to be more efficient. In return, we pass these savings onto you as discounts of up to 72 percent.2 When you buy a reservation, you immediately receive a discount and are no longer charged at pay-as-you-go rates. This offer is ideal for Azure services that use significant capacity or run for long periods of time in a consistent way.

Reservation discounts apply to the following eligible subscriptions and offer types:

• Enterprise agreements (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0017P or MS-AZR-0148P).
• Microsoft Customer Agreement subscriptions.
• Individual plans with pay-as-you-go rates (offer numbers: MS-AZR-0003P or MS-AZR-0023P).
• Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) subscriptions.

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Improve Your Cost Management with AWS Saving Plans

The adaptability and flexibility of today’s cloud services present a lot of opportunities to cut infrastructure costs. Amazon Web Services and its plethora of services let you set up any kind of cloud environment for any type of application, without forcing you to make long-term commitments. At the very least, you don’t have to make a big initial investment to set up your cloud environments.

AWS resources are designed to make deploying cloud-native applications easy and affordable. Affordability is always important for businesses because cost-efficient applications guarantee higher returns on cloud investment. The way AWS services are set up allows for easy scaling of apps and cloud resource usage, but keeping your cloud environment efficient is not without its challenges.

#aws #amazon web services #cost #cost optimization #cost analysis #cost management #cost analytics #aws costs

Learn NoSQL in Azure: Diving Deeper into Azure Cosmos DB

This article is a part of the series – Learn NoSQL in Azure where we explore Azure Cosmos DB as a part of the non-relational database system used widely for a variety of applications. Azure Cosmos DB is a part of Microsoft’s serverless databases on Azure which is highly scalable and distributed across all locations that run on Azure. It is offered as a platform as a service (PAAS) from Azure and you can develop databases that have a very high throughput and very low latency. Using Azure Cosmos DB, customers can replicate their data across multiple locations across the globe and also across multiple locations within the same region. This makes Cosmos DB a highly available database service with almost 99.999% availability for reads and writes for multi-region modes and almost 99.99% availability for single-region modes.

In this article, we will focus more on how Azure Cosmos DB works behind the scenes and how can you get started with it using the Azure Portal. We will also explore how Cosmos DB is priced and understand the pricing model in detail.

How Azure Cosmos DB works

As already mentioned, Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-modal NoSQL database service that is geographically distributed across multiple Azure locations. This helps customers to deploy the databases across multiple locations around the globe. This is beneficial as it helps to reduce the read latency when the users use the application.

As you can see in the figure above, Azure Cosmos DB is distributed across the globe. Let’s suppose you have a web application that is hosted in India. In that case, the NoSQL database in India will be considered as the master database for writes and all the other databases can be considered as a read replicas. Whenever new data is generated, it is written to the database in India first and then it is synchronized with the other databases.

Consistency Levels

While maintaining data over multiple regions, the most common challenge is the latency as when the data is made available to the other databases. For example, when data is written to the database in India, users from India will be able to see that data sooner than users from the US. This is due to the latency in synchronization between the two regions. In order to overcome this, there are a few modes that customers can choose from and define how often or how soon they want their data to be made available in the other regions. Azure Cosmos DB offers five levels of consistency which are as follows:

• Strong
• Bounded staleness
• Session
• Consistent prefix
• Eventual

In most common NoSQL databases, there are only two levels – Strong and Eventual. Strong being the most consistent level while Eventual is the least. However, as we move from Strong to Eventual, consistency decreases but availability and throughput increase. This is a trade-off that customers need to decide based on the criticality of their applications. If you want to read in more detail about the consistency levels, the official guide from Microsoft is the easiest to understand. You can refer to it here.

Azure Cosmos DB Pricing Model

Now that we have some idea about working with the NoSQL database – Azure Cosmos DB on Azure, let us try to understand how the database is priced. In order to work with any cloud-based services, it is essential that you have a sound knowledge of how the services are charged, otherwise, you might end up paying something much higher than your expectations.

If you browse to the pricing page of Azure Cosmos DB, you can see that there are two modes in which the database services are billed.

• Database Operations – Whenever you execute or run queries against your NoSQL database, there are some resources being used. Azure terms these usages in terms of Request Units or RU. The amount of RU consumed per second is aggregated and billed
• Consumed Storage – As you start storing data in your database, it will take up some space in order to store that data. This storage is billed per the standard SSD-based storage across any Azure locations globally

Let’s learn about this in more detail.

#azure #azure cosmos db #nosql #azure #nosql in azure #azure cosmos db

Kubernetes: Monitoring, Reducing, and Optimizing Your Costs

Over the past two years at Magalix, we have focused on building our system, introducing new features, and scaling our infrastructure and microservices. During this time, we had a look at our Kubernetes clusters utilization and found it to be very low. We were paying for resources we didn’t use, so we started a cost-saving practice to increase cluster utilization, use the resources we already had and pay less to run our cluster.

In this article, I will discuss the top five techniques we used to better utilize our Kubernetes clusters on the cloud and eliminate wasted resources, thus saving money. In the end, we were able to cut our monthly bill by more than 50%!

• Applying Workload Right-Sizing
• Choosing The Right Worker Nodes
• Autoscaling Workloads
• Autoscaling Worker Nodes
• Purchasing Commitment/Saving Plans

#cloud-native #kubernetes #optimization #kubecost #kubernetes-cost-savings #kubernetes-cost-monitoring #kubernetes-reduce-cost #kubernetes-cost-analysis

How to set up Azure Data Sync between Azure SQL databases and on-premises SQL Server

In this article, you learn how to set up Azure Data Sync services. In addition, you will also learn how to create and set up a data sync group between Azure SQL database and on-premises SQL Server.

In this article, you will see:

• Overview of Azure SQL Data Sync feature
• Discuss key components
• Comparison between Azure SQL Data sync with the other Azure Data option
• Setup Azure SQL Data Sync
• More…

Azure Data Sync

Azure Data Sync —a synchronization service set up on an Azure SQL Database. This service synchronizes the data across multiple SQL databases. You can set up bi-directional data synchronization where data ingest and egest process happens between the SQL databases—It can be between Azure SQL database and on-premises and/or within the cloud Azure SQL database. At this moment, the only limitation is that it will not support Azure SQL Managed Instance.

#azure #sql azure #azure sql #azure data sync #azure sql #sql server

AWS Cost Allocation Tags and Cost Reduction

Bob had just arrived in the office for his first day of work as the newly hired chief technical officer when he was called into a conference room by the president, Martha, who immediately introduced him to the head of accounting, Amanda. They exchanged pleasantries, and then Martha got right down to business:

“Bob, we have several teams here developing software applications on Amazon and our bill is very high. We think it’s unnecessarily high, and we’d like you to look into it and bring it under control.”

Martha placed a screenshot of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing report on the table and pointed to it.

“This is a problem for us: We don’t know what we’re spending this money on, and we need to see more detail.”

Amanda chimed in, “Bob, look, we have financial dimensions that we use for reporting purposes, and I can provide you with some guidance regarding some information we’d really like to see such that the reports that are ultimately produced mirror these dimensions — if you can do this, it would really help us internally.”

“Bob, we can’t stress how important this is right now. These projects are becoming very expensive for our business,” Martha reiterated.

“How many projects do we have?” Bob inquired.

“We have four projects in total: two in the aviation division and two in the energy division. If it matters, the aviation division has 75 developers and the energy division has 25 developers,” the CEO responded.

Bob understood the problem and responded, “I’ll see what I can do and have some ideas. I might not be able to give you retrospective insight, but going forward, we should be able to get a better idea of what’s going on and start to bring the cost down.”

The meeting ended with Bob heading to find his desk. Cost allocation tags should help us, he thought to himself as he looked for someone who might know where his office is.

#aws #aws cloud #node js #cost optimization #aws cli #well architected framework #aws cost report #cost control #aws cost #aws tags