What are the best cloud cost optimization strategies that enterprises implement on Azure

What are the best cloud cost optimization strategies that enterprises implement on Azure

Digitally mature and new organizations using cloud are increasingly moving their IT assets on cloud to achieve better technical capabilities for their business. But this has resulted in increased cloud costs and IT budget which is not economical for an organization and can lead to waste and over utilization of resources and money. When utilizing services on Microsoft Azure cloud, Azure managed services providers deliver organizations cloud cost optimization strategies that can be implemented to optimize and save cloud costs.

Nevertheless, CTOs that have recently guided their organizations to migrate on Azure still see Azure cloud cost optimization as a challenge. How to manage costs by utilizing the right tools, implementing best practices to curb wastage of unused compute resources, are 2 of the many important questions faced by an IT head while trying to efficiently utilize services on cloud. In such cases, organizations can choose Azure consulting services from the cloud providers they worked with while migrating their on-premises IT assets on Azure. Azure cloud service providers helps an IT team to adopt some of the best Azure cloud cost optimization methods to manage costs and resources associated with Azure services.

Cloud cost optimization includes choosing the right pricing models, managing Azure resources, and the usage of cloud services and therefore IT heads must focus on a solid strategy to control costs reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and increase Return on Investment (ROI). Azure partners can help organizations with cost optimization in Azure in these 4 of the many areas to achieve cost savings on Azure.

Azure payment options for instances

As Azure comes with different hardware and performance capabilities for workloads, Azure provides 3 types of payment options for Virtual Machine (VM) instances. With pay-as-you-go option, a user can use a VM instantly or on-demand. This is a flexible option with no upfront costs as users can run their instances whenever and as long as they want. Another option is reserving VM instances form 1 year to 3 years, this means paying upfront for these specific years getting a discount from 40-60% for the VMs a user will use. Spot pricing is another purchasing option that allows a user to bid for available capacity on Azure Marketplace and get discounts on instances upto 90%.

Moving away from traditional databases

Running traditional databases on cloud is expensive and database VMs are not used efficiently as it does not appropriately distribute loads between workloads instances. To cut overall Azure costs, choosing PaaS and an SQL elastic pool is a good option. A server Azure SQL automatically scales compute resources and usage depending on the workload amount, which results in paying on the for the computing power used.

Right size VMs

It is important to find the right VM for your workload as Azure offers many hardware and performance capabilities at lowest cost rate so finding the right one is important. It can be a bit of an effort to find the right combination of VMs for projects but once figured out, the auto-scaling feature can adjust the number of VMs that are selected according to actual workloads.

Switch to containers

Workloads running on VMs can be migrated to containers as they save cloud hosting costs because they use lower resources on virtualization. Containers optimize costs as they combine different tasks on a single server host and managing these containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) can help a user consolidate all VMs to save hosting costs and reduce digital footprint.