To achieve significant savings in your Azure subscription, consider the following strategies:
- Rightsize Resources: Evaluate your VMs and storage usage to downsize underutilized resources. Use Azure Advisor for insights.
- Use Reserved Instances: Commit to 1- or 3-year terms for VMs and databases to get discounts.
- Leverage Azure Hybrid Benefits: Reuse existing licenses for Windows Server or SQL Server.
- Enable Auto-shutdown: Stop non-essential VMs during off-hours.
- Optimize Storage: Move infrequently accessed data to cheaper storage tiers (e.g., Cool or Archive).
- Review Network Costs: Minimize unnecessary outbound data transfer charges.
- Use Spot VMs: Save up to 90% on batch or non-critical workloads.
- Ensure only authorised individuals can create resources
- Constantly monitor usage (storage, bandwidth, etc) and generate alarms
- Regularly (perhaps on a monthly basis) review cost reports.
- The region also affects the cost
- Cloud providers can also charge for operations – read, write, list, delete
- There can be charges for pay per message, pay per query to a database
- Cloud providers, Azure in particular, have very complex pricing models that needs to be reviewed
- Bandwidth is also chargeable.
- Support – we need to ask ourselves – do we actually need MS support for a particular service?
- Azure functions – charges per execution
- Always use the pricing calculator
Let me know if you’d like more detailed advice on any of these!