There are a set of services or techniques administrators can use to get the best out of their infrastructure.

Reservations  Reserved instances (RIs), or reservations, can be used by customers to save costs on selected services. Selected services include Azure Virtual Machine, SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and other services. You can pay for a one-year or three-year term for these services upfront or in a monthly manner. For certain services, Microsoft has extended the term to five years. Purchasing reservations will reduce the costs up to 72 percent over the Pay As You Go rates.

Azure Hybrid Benefit  You can bring your own Windows Server or SQL Server or Linux licenses to use on Azure Virtual Machine, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Managed Instances. If you have already purchased licenses with software assurance, you don’t have to pay for these licenses in Azure. Combining RI and Azure Hybrid Benefit can increase the savings.

Azure Credits and Dev/Test Subscriptions  It’s always recommended that you choose the right subscription to host your workloads. If you are testing or developing solutions, there are subscriptions with free credit that can be utilized rather than deploying your solutions in a production subscription and paying invoices. For example, if you are a Visual Studio Subscriber (Enterprise/Professional), you can get a subscription with free credits that gets renewed every month. If you have an EA, then you can use an EA Dev/Test subscription for testing and development. EA Dev/Test rates are cheaper than the production EA subscription. Similarly, Pay As You Go customers can purchase PAYG Dev/Test for development and testing purposes.

Azure Regions  The prices of Azure services vary from region to region; you can always deploy to a region that has a lower cost to save your spending. However, make sure that this decision is not affecting the performance or data residency requirements (if there are any).

Budgets  You already learned about budgets in the “Plan and Control Expenses” section. Having a budget will help you get notified whenever you are crossing the limits assigned to you; you can also take necessary actions to remediate this. Budgets plays a crucial role in accounting and cost tracking.

Pricing Calculator  In Azure, there are hundreds of services, and each service has several pricing tiers. It’s not possible for an administrator or an architect to remember all these pricings and calculate them. Using the Pricing Calculator, you can estimate the cost of any service in Azure. You can export it to Excel to share with your stakeholders or directly share the link for estimation. The Pricing Calculator can be accessed here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/calculator

We will now move on to resource groups.