Microsoft Azure Cloud — Undersanding Cloud Pricings
→ Cloud pricing is hard to predict. In this article, we will look at various factors for Azure Cloud pricing.
→ Based on the resource type pricing may vary. Some of the resource types are:
a. On-Premise: Normally company/businesses here have purchased their own hardwares and rent softwares from the cloud.
b. FAAS: This stands for Function as a Service. Normally no additional servers are required for running Azure functions.
c. PAAS: This stands for Platform as a Service. Here basically OS is ready to be used.
d. SAAS: This stands for Software as a Service. Here Ready software is rented by the cloud team to be used directly.
→ The idea to know the above resources are pricing varies based on the above type of resources.
→ The easiest way to predict the bill is for on-premise resources:
a. own hardware — no cost
b. Wifi — fixed cost
c. cooling — fixed cost
d. Cloud Services — some predicted cost
→ Let us see an example. If we are using Azure database:
Cosmos DB:
→ Cost will vary based on below factors:
Let us now see various factors on which Azure pricing on bills comes:
1. Free Services:
→ Yes, Microsoft Azure has free services and can be used. Some of them are listed below:
a. Azure Function (similar to AWS Lambda Function)
b. Azure Policy (creating multiple policies for the Azure services),
c. Running a blog in Azure app service for free, etc.
2. Pay for Time:
→ There are several services that generate bills based on the time we use it
eg. Virtual Machine, App services, databases, load balancers, managed storages, public IPs
→ These services are above the free tier.
3. Pay per GB:
→ This bill generates based on the quantity of storage.
→ Anything to do with storage or traffic comes under this category.
eg. sending traffic between regions. Sending traffic from Asia to America, doing regular backups, etc.
→ So we pay for the GB for the traffic it travels.
4. Pay per Operations:
→ In some cases we will be charged per operation.
→ These are generally bulked together so we are paying for the operations:
eg. 10,000 requests, per million requests etc.
→ In the case of storage there will be charges for:
a. Reads, writes and deletes for things like that.
b. Database queries
c. Messaging in Queues (similar to Amazon SQS service)
5. Pay per Executions:
→ There are several serverless operations that cost per executions
Some of them are –
a. Azure Functions (similar to AWS Lambda Functions) — first 1 million per month free. So even if we have a code that runs once a month then it is free.
b. Serverless Databases
c. Messaging Services
d. Logic Apps
→ So what we are trying to understand here various metrics based on which Microsoft charges bills.
5. Other Metrics for Bills charges:
→ Some are paid based on users, some on the geographical region of the services
Eg. Services running in North America can be more reasonable based on South America.
→ If saving money for Azure bill is the goal, then we can keep in geographical data centres that are having a low prices.
Eg. storing a file in some other region.
Closing Thoughts:
In this article, we understood various ways by which Microsoft charges for using Azure services. It is important to understand why our bills are charged and hence we use services in a more optimized way.
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