Module 4 - Azure Pricing and Support
Azure Subscription
Azure Subscriptions
- An Azure Subscription is a logical unit of Azure services that linked to Azure account
- An account can have one or multiples subscription that have different billing models and access management policies.
- Subscription boundaries:
- Billing boundary - how Azure account is billed
- Access control boundary - access-management policies can be applied at subscription level
Subscription Offers
- Free account
- 12 months of popular services
- $200 credit to explore any Azure services for 30 days
- Services are disabled after credit exhausts.
- You can upgrade to remove spending limit
- 25+ services that are always free
- You need a phone number and a credit or debit card and an account (GitHub or Microsoft)
- After upgrade, for 12 months, you get certain amount of popular products for free then you're billed at standard pay-as-you-go rate.
- Pay-As-You-Go - Pay for what you use
- Member offers - You have existing membership to certain Microsoft products and services
- Can apply Azure account at reduced rate
- See this page for more information about offers
Management Group
- Organizing resource in 4 levels:
- Management groups
- a container that you manage access, policy, compliance for multiple subscriptions
- up to 10,000 groups in a single directory
- Can have 6 level in depth excluding root and subscription level
- Subscriptions
- Group user accounts and resources
- There are limits or quotas on amount of resources you can create and use
- Resource groups
- Logical container for Azure resources
- Resources
Planning and Managing Cost
Purchasing Azure Products and Services
- 3 main customer types:
- Enterprise
- With an enterprise agreement that commit to spend a negotiated amount
- Pay annually
- Access to customized pricing
- Web direct
- Public prize
- Billed monthly
- Cloud solution provider (CSP)
- Microsoft partner that customer hires to build solutions on Azure
- Payment and billing done via CSP
- Explore flexible purchasing options for Azure
Factors Affecting Costs
- Usage meter
- Meter is created automatically for created resource
- It tracks usage of the resource and generate usage records that will be used to calculate the bill
- Resource Types
- Each meter tracks specific type of usage e.g. bandwidth, number of operations, size
- Services
- Usage rate and billing period can differ between customer types
- Product and services from third-party in the marketplace may have billing structure
- Location
- Cost vary by location
- Trade off between lower cost location vs. cost of transferring data between resources
- More information about Azure usage charges on this page
Zones for Billing
- Bandwidth = data moving in or out of Azure data center
- Some inbound data are free
- Outbound data pricing based on Zones:
- Zone 1 - West US, East US, Canada West, West Europe, France Central and others
- Zone 2 - Australia Central, Japan West, Central India, Korea South and others
- Zone 3 - Brazil South
- DE Zone 1 - Germany Central, Germany Northeast
- Billing Zone is not the same as Availability Zone
Pricing Calculator
- Pricing Calculator can help you estimate the cost (not actual) of Azure products by adjusting different configuration options:
- Region
- Tier - Free, Basic, Standard, etc.
- Billing Options - different types of customer or subscription
- Support options - you can select paid support
- Programs and Offers - Different price offering
- Azure Dev/Tst Pricing - only subscription based on Dev/Tst offer
Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
- TCO Calculator is used to estimate the cost saving by migrating to Azure
- Steps:
- 1. Define workloads of your on-premise infrastructure
- 2. Adjust assumptions for different types of costs
- 3. View the report compares the cost of your on-premise infrastructure vs. Azure products and services
Minimizing Costs
Azure Cost Management
- Cost Management provides set of tools for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing costs.
- Provided tools:
- Reporting - Use history data to forecast future cost
- Data Enrichment - categorizing resources by tags
- Budgets and alert
- Recommendation - to eliminate idle resources
- Free to use
Azure Support Options
Support Plan Options
- Free access to the following services:
- Billing and subscription support
- Azure products and services documentation
- Online self-help documentation
- Whitepapers
- Community support forums
- Four paid Azure supported plans:
- Basic
- For billing and subscription support
- 24x7 online help and documentation and support forums
- Full list of Azure Advisor recommendations
- Developer
- For trial and non-production environments
- Accessible to engineer by email during service hours
- Standard
- For production workloads
- 24x7 accessible to engineer by email or phone
- Professional Direct
- Architecture guidance by ProDirect Delivery Manager
- On-boarding services
- Azure Engineering web seminar
Alternative Support Channels
Knowledge Center
Azure Service Level Agreement (SLAs)
Service Level Agreement (SLAs)
Composite SLAs
- Result from combining SLA from different services
- Example:
- App Service Web Apps is 99.95%
- SQL Database is 99.99%
- Composite SLA is 99.95% x 99.99% = 99.94%
- The combined probability of failure value is always lower than the individual SLA values.
- You can design or architect your application for more resiliency but it has trade-off:
- application logic more complex
- more cost
- data-consistency issue
Application SLAs
- Creating your own application SLA, you need to consider:
- Identify workload for each logically separated tasks
- Plan for usage pattern - critical and non-critical periods
- Establish availability metrics
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) = Average time it takes to restore a component after a failure
- Mean Time between Failures (MTBF) = How long a component can reasonably expect to last between outages
- Establish recovery metrics
- Recovery time objective (RTO) = The maximum acceptable time an application can be unavailable after an incident
- Recovery point objective (RPO) = The maximum duration of data loss that is acceptable during a disaster
- Implement resiliency strategies = The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function
- Build availability requirements
- Availability = The proportion of time your system is functional and working
- 99.99% are going to be very difficult to achieve
Service Lifecycle in Azure
Public and Private Preview Features
- Private Preview = Azure feature is available to certain Azure customers for evaluation purposes
- Public Preview = Azure feature is available to ALL Azure customers for evaluation purposes
- Some Azure previews are not covered by customer support
- Preview features can be accessed by searching for preview
- Some preview features relate to a specific area of an existing Azure Service e.g. Kubernetes preview versions
- Preview features or functionality may not yet be ready for production deployments
Azure Portal Preview
General Availability (GA)
- After the featured is evaluated and tested successfully, it may be released to all Azure customers.
- Updates about new product features can be found here
Monitoring Service and Feature Updates
- Azure Updates provides information about the latest updates to Azure products, services, and features as well as product roadmaps and announcements
