Techniques for minimizing costs while not compromising efficiency
While setting up an Azure VM, it is important to understand the pricing model and service offerings well in advance before setting up the environment. If not, we may end up paying exorbitant bills that could have been avoided if cost-optimization strategies had been followed. In this article, we discuss practical strategies and insights to help you avoid such situations and maintain better control over your costs. We’ll also discuss how much is too much and the role of premium features in Azure pricing.
Note that the article has images having sizing and configurations in Azure. These have been procured from the Azure portal from a certain region at the time of writing. They have been shown here purely for demonstration purposes and should not be considered to be indicative of current availability or configurations for your region. It is advisable to refer to the official Azure documentation (or your Azure Portal) for the most up-to-date and accurate information regarding costs and pricing.
Let’s get started.
Azure VMs are billed based on resource usage, which includes CPU, memory, and storage consumption. It’s important to note that you will be charged for these resources, even if the VM is idle or not actively being used. In other words, you will get charged just for keeping the VM ‘ON’ whether or not there are processes/jobs running inside the VM at a certain point in time. Hence, workload optimization is necessary to prevent unnecessary expenses.
To effectively handle this, do the following:
- Identify the processes and jobs you intend to set up in the VM. This can be a process related to your application server, or even a job that runs within a database hosted on the VM.
- Determine dependencies between jobs i.e., Identify jobs that need to run in parallel and those that need to run concurrently. Also, make a note of jobs that are…