Module 4 - Azure Pricing

Zone 2

Australia Central, Japan West, Central India, Korea South and others

Billing boundary

This subscription type determines how an Azure account is billed for using Azure. You can create multiple subscriptions for different types of billing requirements, and Azure will generate separate billing reports and invoices for each subscription so that you can organize and manage costs.

Do services Azure usage rates and billing periods differ between Enterprise, Web Direct, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) customers?

Yes, some subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs. The Azure team develops and offers first-party products and services, while products and services from third-party vendors are available in the Azure marketplace. Different billing structures apply to each of these categories.

Pay-As-You-Go

This subscription allows you to pay for what you use by attaching a credit or debit card to your account. Organizations can apply to Microsoft for invoicing privileges.

What level is below management groups in the Azure organization structure?

Subscriptions

What is the Location factor?

The Azure infrastructure is globally distributed, and usage costs might vary between locations that offer Azure products, services, and resources.

What is the Pricing Calculator?

A tool that helps you estimate the cost of Azure products. It displays Azure products in categories, and you choose the Azure products you need and configure them according to your specific requirements. Azure then provides a detailed estimate of the costs associated with your selections and configurations

What is the total cost of ownership calculator?

A tool that you use to estimate cost savings you can realize by migrating to Azure.

Subscription models

An account can have one or multiple subscriptions that have different billing models and to which you apply different access management policies

How many parents can each management group and subscription support?

1

How many management groups can be supported in a single directory?

10,000

Free account

12 months of popular free services; 200 credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and 25+ services that are always free. Your Azure services are disabled when the trial ends or when your credit expires for paid products, unless you upgrade to a paid subscription

What is do all support plans cover for Customer Service and Communities?

24x7 access to customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and support forums

How many management group trees/levels of depths can be supported?

6

What is a Zone?

A geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes.

Resource groups

A logical container into which Azure resources like web apps, databases, and storage accounts are deployed and managed.

Example of meter tracking and usage.

A meter might track bandwidth usage (ingress or egress network traffic in bits-per-second), number of operations, size (storage capacity in bytes), or similar items. The usage that a meter tracks correlates to a quantity of billable units. Those are charged to your account for each billing period, and the rate per billable unit depends on the resource type you are using.

What is do all support plans cover for Best Practices?

Access to full set of Azure Advisor recommendations

What do you need to sign up for a free account?

All you need is a phone number, a credit or debit card, and a GitHub account or Microsoft account username (formerly Windows Live ID).

Programs and Offers

Allows you to choose from available price offerings according to your customer or subscription type.

Support Options

Allows you to pick from included or paid support pricing options for a selected product.

Networking TCO

Amount of network bandwidth you currently consume in your on-premises environment.

What is Azure Cost Management?

An Azure product that provides a set of tools for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing your Azure costs.

When you provision an Azure resource, what does Azure do?

Azure creates one or more meter instances for that resource. The meters track the resources' usage, and each meter generates a usage record that is used to calculate your bill.

Access control boundary

Azure will apply access-management policies at the subscription level, and you can create separate subscriptions to reflect different organizational structures.

Billing zones

Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure datacenters. Some inbound data transfers, such as data going into Azure datacenters, are free. For outbound data transfers, such as data going out of Azure datacenters, data transfer pricing is based on Zones.

What are the four paid Azure support plans for customers?

Basic; Developer; Standard; Professional Direct

What are the five elements of an Azure support plan?

Billing and subscription support; Azure products and services documentation; Online self-help documentation; Whitepapers; Community support forums.

What is Basic Scope support?

Billing and subscription support; online self-help

What are the two types of subscription boundaries that you can use?

Billing boundary and Access Control Boundary

Zone 3

Brazil South

What is Developer Technical support?

Business hours access to Support Engineers via email

What is Professional Direct Scope support?

Business-critical dependence

Resource type.

Costs are resource-specific, so the usage that a meter tracks and the number of meters associated with a resource depend on the resource type

Cost Management - Budgets

Create and manage cost and usage budgets by monitoring resource demand trends, consumption rates, and cost patterns.

Web direct

Customers pay public prices for Azure resources, and their monthly billing and payments occur through the Azure website.

Enterprise

Customers sign an Enterprise Agreement with Azure that commits them to spending a negotiated amount on Azure services, which they typically pay annually. Customers also have access to customized Azure pricing.

What are the three steps in the TCO calculator?

Define your workloads, Adjust assumptions, View reports

Servers TCO

Details of your current on-premises server infrastructure.

Databases TCO

Details of your on-premises database infrastructure in the Source section. In the Destination section, select the corresponding Azure service you would like to use.

Storage TCO

Details of your on-premises storage infrastructure.

What are Azure reservations?

Discounted prices on certain Azure products and resources. To get a discount, you reserve products and resources by paying in advance. You can pre-pay for one year or three years of use of Virtual Machines, SQL Database Compute Capacity, Azure Cosmos Database Throughput, and other Azure resources

What are the three main customer types on which the available purchasing options for Azure products and services is contingent?

Enterprise, Web Select, and Cloud Service Provider

What is the highest level in the Azure organization structure?

Management groups

What happens at the end of the 12 months of free products?

For 12 months after you upgrade your account, certain amounts of popular products for compute, networking, storage, and databases are free. After 12 months, any of these products you may be using will continue to run, and you'll be billed at the standard pay-as-you-go rates.

Subscription requirements

For each subscription, there are limits or quotas on the amount of resources you can create and use. Organizations can use subscriptions to manage costs and the resources that are created by users, teams, or projects

Member offer examples

For example, member offers are available to Microsoft Visual Studio subscribers, Microsoft Partner Network members, Microsoft BizSpark members, and Microsoft Imagine members.

Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test

For teams of active Visual Studio subscribers to run dev/test workloads on Microsoft Azure providing discounted rates on Windows virtual machines and access to exclusive images in the Azure Gallery.

Cost Management - Price

Free to Azure customers.

What is Use spending limits?

Free trial customers and some credit-based Azure subscriptions can use the Spending Limits feature. Azure provides the Spending Limits feature to help prevent you from exhausting the credit on your account within each billing period. If you have a credit-based subscription and you reach your configured spending limit, Azure suspends your subscription until a new billing period begins.

Cost Management - Reporting

Generate reports using historical data to forecast future usage and expenditure.

DE Zone 1

Germany Central, Germany Northeast

Cost Management - Alerting

Get alerts based on your cost and usage budgets.

Subscriptions

Groups together user accounts and the resources that have been created by those user accounts. .

What are tags in Azure?

Help you manage costs associated with the different groups of Azure products and resources. You can apply these to groups of Azure products and resources to organize billing data.

Billing Options

Highlights the options available to different types of customer and subscriptions for a chosen product.

What are the four levels of organizing structure for resources in Azure?

Management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources.

What is an example of a tag?

If you run several virtual machines for different teams, you can use tags to categorize costs by department, such as Human Resources, Marketing, or Finance, or by environment, such as Production or Test. Tags make it easy to identify groups that generate the biggest Azure costs, so you can adjust your spending accordingly

Cost Management - Data enrichment

Improve accountability by categorizing resources with tags that correspond to real-world business and organizational units.

Resources

Instances of services that you create, like virtual machines, storage, or SQL databases.

What to research to minimize Azure costs?

Keep up-to-date with the latest Azure customer and subscription offers, and switch to offers that provide the greatest cost-saving benefit.

Azure Dev/Test Pricing

Lists the available prices for a product. Dev/Test pricing applies only when you run resources within an Azure subscription that is based on a Dev/Test offer.

Region

Lists the regions from which you can provision a product. Southeast Asia, central Canada, the western United States, and Northern Europe are among the possible regions available for some resources.

Azure Subscription

Logical unit of Azure services that links to an Azure account, which is an identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or in a directory that Azure trusts

Does the limit of trees/level of depth include the Root level or the subscription level?

No

Azure Subscription

Provides you with authenticated and authorized access to Azure products and services and allows you to provision resources

How should you manage metered resources?

Some resources are metered and billed according to how much outgoing network bandwidth they consume (egress). You should provision connected resources that are bandwidth metered in the same region to reduce egress traffic between them

Do you pay anything to start with the Azure free account?

No. Starting is free, plus you get a $200 credit you can spend during the first 30 days.

What is Basic Technical support?

None.

What is the ratio of management group to children?

One to many

What customers can use Azure Reservations?

Only available to Enterprise or CSP customers and for Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions

What are the three types of Subscription Offers?

Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test, Visual Studio Enterprise: BizSpark, Visual Studio Professional

How to perform a cost analysis?

Plan your Azure solution wisely. Carefully consider the products, services, and resources you need, and read the relevant documentation to understand how each of your choices are metered and billed. Additionally, you should calculate your projected costs by using the Azure Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculators, only adding the products, services, and resources you need.

What is Standard Scope support?

Production workload environments

What is the pricing calculator?

Provides estimates, not actual price quotes. Actual prices may vary depending upon the date of purchase, the payment currency you are using, and the type of Azure customer you are.

Cost Management - Recommendations

Receive recommendations to eliminate idle resources and to optimize the Azure resources you provision.

What are the options that you can configure in the pricing calculator vary between products?

Region, Tier, Billing Options, Support Options, Programs and Offers, Azure Dev/Test Pricing

What are the main features of the Azure Cost Management toolset?

Reporting, Data Enrichment, Budgets, Alerting, Recommendations, Price

What level is below subscriptions in the Azure organization structure?

Resource groups

What level is below resource groups in the Azure organization structure?

Resources

What should be included in Define your workloads?

Servers, Databases, Storage, Networking

Tier

Sets the type of tier you wish to allocate to a selected resource, such as Free Tier, Basic Tier, etc.

What is view the report?

The TCO calculator generates a detailed report based on the details you enter and the adjustments you make. The report allows you to compare the costs of your on-premises infrastructure with the costs using Azure products and services to host your infrastructure in the cloud.

How to choose low-cost locations and regions.

The cost of Azure products, services, and resources can vary across locations and regions, and if possible, you should use them in those locations and regions where they cost less.

Are there limits on Use spending?

The spending limit feature is not available for customers who aren't using credit-based subscriptions, such as PayAs-You-Go subscribers.

What is the difference between an Availability Zone and Billing Zone (Zone)?

The term Zone is for billing purposes only, and the full-term Availability Zone refers to the failure protection that Azure provides for datacenters.

What is a Management group?

These are containers that help you manage access, policy, and compliance for multiple subscriptions. All subscriptions in a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied to the management group.

How can Azure subscriptions be used?

To define boundaries around Azure products, services, and resources.

How is the pricing calculator used?

To get new estimates by adding, removing, or reconfiguring your selected products. You

What is Developer Scope support?

Trial and nonproduction environments

Cloud Solution Provider

Typically are Microsoft partner companies that a customer hires to build solutions on top of Azure. Payment and billing for Azure usage occurs through the customer's CSP.

Visual Studio Enterprise: BizSpark

Use MSDN software at no additional charge.

Visual Studio Professional

Use MSDN software for development and test at no additional charge.

What is the Azure Advisor?

Used to determine an efficient architecture, provisioned resources match the demand for those resources. The tool identifies unused or under-utilized resources, and you can implement its recommendations by removing unused resources and configuring your resources to match your actual demand.

What are Adjustment assumptions?

Values of key assumptions that the TCO calculator makes, which might vary between customers. To improve the accuracy of the TCO calculator, you should adjust the values so they match the costs of your current on-premises infrastructure. The assumption values you can adjust include storage costs, IT labor costs, hardware costs, software costs, electricity costs, virtualization costs, datacenter costs, networking costs, and database costs

What happens once you use my $200 free credit or I'm at the end of 30 days?

We'll notify you so you can decide if you want to upgrade to pay-as-you-go pricing and remove the spending limit. If you do, you'll have access to all the free products. If you don't, your account and products will be disabled, and you'll need to upgrade to resume usage.

Zone 1

West US, East US, Canada West, West Europe, France Central and others

Access control boundary example

Within a business, you have different departments to which you apply distinct Azure subscription policies. This allows you to manage and control access to the resources that users provision with specific subscriptions.

Location example

You might want to build your Azure solution by provisioning resources in locations that offer the lowest prices, but this would require transferring data between locations, if dependent resources and their users are located in different parts of the world. If there are meters tracking the volume of data that transfers between the resources you provision, any potential savings you make from choosing the cheapest location could be offset by the additional cost of transferring data between those resources

Member offers

Your existing membership to certain Microsoft products and services affords you credits for your Azure account and reduced rates on Azure services