3.1.2 Describe Factors that can Affect Costs in Azure

Description of factors affecting cost in Azure.

Azure moves development costs from CapEx to OpEx by providing infrastructure as it is needed. OpEx cost can be impacted by many factors, including:

• Resource type

• Consumption

• Maintenance

• Geography

• Subscription type

• Azure Marketplace

Resource Type

The type of resource, resource settings and Azure region all impact how much a resource costs. Azure tracks resource usage with metered instances to calculate your bill.

For example, with a storage account, a type is specified, as well as an access tier, redundancy settings, and a region. Creating a storage account in different regions may show different costs. Settings may also impact price. With VMs, you may need to consider OS licensing, software licensing, processor & number of cores for VM and so on.

Consumption

Pay-as-you-go is the cloud model where you only pay for resources used during a billing cycle. Azure offers the ability to commit to using a set amount of cloud resources in advance and receiving discounts on those "reserved" resources. The discount can be up to 72 percent depending on the service.

Pay-as-you-go serves as a backup, allowing resources to be scaled to meet demand in excess of your reservation.

Maintenance

Resource groups help keep resources organized. To control costs, the environment must be maintained. Each time a VM is provisioned, resources like storage and networking are also provisioned. When a VM is deprovisioned, these resources may not deprovision at the same time, it is important to track this.

Geography

The cost of power, labour, taxes and fees varies based on geography. Network traffic is also impacted based on geography, for example, it is cheaper to move information within Europe than it is to move information from Europe to Asia.

Network Traffic

Some inbound data transfers are free, outbound data transfers are based on zones. Zones are groupings of Azure resources for billing purposes.

Subscription Type

Some types include allowances, like the free trial which allows access to certain products for 12 months.

Azure Marketplace

Allows Azure-based solutions to be purchased from third-party vendors. In this case, you may pay for both the Azure services and the services of the third party. All Azure marketplace solutions are certified and compliant.