John McCormack DBA

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7 ways for data teams to save money in Azure

19th January 2021 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

Save money in Azure

save money in azure - piggy bank with sunglasses

In this series of posts, I list 7 ways to quickly save money in Azure by using cost optimisation principles. Get on top of your cloud costs and start saving money by putting these into action. Whilst this series is specific to Azure, most of the principles can be applied to other public cloud providers. The only thing that differs is the product. Think RDS as an equivalent for SQL DB or S3 for Storage Accounts.

It’s important to keep on top of your cloud costs. Operating in the cloud means it is easy to just spin up new instances in minutes. Whilst that is great and allows company to work in agile manner, the switch to an Operational Expenditure (OPEX) model means that the cost increase can be gradual and go unnoticed.

1. Review your backup retention policy

Azure IaaS SQL Backups – Stop burning money

2. Right size your Azure SQL DBs and managed instances

Your Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance is too big

3. Turn non production instances off out of hours

Turn the cloud off at bedtime to save 70%

4. Right Size your VMs to save money in Azure

Your Azure SQL Virtual Machine might be too big

5. Consider moving to Azure SQL DB serverless

Save money with Azure SQL DB serverless

6. Reserved instances

Save with reserved instances – even up to 73%

7. Delete unused instances

Delete unused instances to save money in Azure

Bonus steps:

This mini series of steps are also important.

  1. Implement Elastic Pools to share resources
  2. Look to see if you are eligible for Azure Hybrid Benefit

Everybody wins

By optimising your costs in Azure and ensuring you are paying the right price for all of your services, everybody wins. Not only are you helping your company save money, it is good for your career and it could even save jobs in your company. Not to mention turning off what you don’t use is good for the environment too.

Need some help? – Book a call

Please get in touch if you would like to schedule a free introductory 15 minute call for some help in reducing your Azure bill.

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Filed Under: Azure, cost-optimization Tagged With: azure, azure billing, azure iaas, azure sql db, cost optimisation, cost optimization

About John McCormack

John McCormack is an experienced SQL DBA with extensive knowledge of the two largest public clouds: AWS and Azure.

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