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Imagine that you’ve deployed something in Azure, expecting it to cost $200 per month, but instead find that your boss gets a bill for $1,000. That’s when your boss will ask you to find out how the money disappeared. In this article, I’ll help you understand how much you are really spending in Microsoft Azure.
If you want to know where you are spending in Azure, then you need to understand:
I have to be blunt here: it’s quite a mammoth task to learn how Azure pricing works. Azure is a utility, so your services are measured and charge on a utilization basis. There is no “pricing for a VM in the cloud”; instead, the solution will be comprised of billable items that potentially include the following:
To be honest, most of the costs are pretty predictable. If I deploy a D2 v2 virtual machine in East US 2, then I know that it will cost $0.289 per hour, averaging around $215 per month. Storage for virtual machines is pretty predictable, too. I’m the one responsible for creating and sizing my data disks.
Costs that are more difficult to estimate include:
To be honest, both costs are usually quite small in the grand scale of things. In fact, Microsoft even removed storage transaction pricing from the storage pricing site.
Other costs are painfully complicated; a perfect example of that is Premium Storage, which is based on disk abstractions called P10, P20, and P30, which only a fan of tax law could be a fan of. SSD storage in Azure is based on units of each of these specifications, and sometimes those units are expressed as a fraction (in decimal form). I have no idea why Microsoft couldn’t bill based on GBs consumed, as they do with Standard Storage.
Once you know the design and specification of your solution(s), then estimating the pricing those solutions is not too hard, and it gets easier with practice, especially if you start to compare what has been deployed versus what has been consumed.
The Azure Portal is very good at presenting information to administrators. You can customize the blades of elements in your subscription to see how much they are costing you. You can also browse to your subscription in the portal to view the burn rate; This shows how much credit remains and a high-level graphical breakdown of how credit is being consumed. Below you can see that the majority of my credit has gone on “compute hours,” AKA virtual machines.
Graphical breakdown of spending in Azure (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
A high-level breakdown of resource costs in Azure (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
If you want forensic information, then the Account Portal is the place to go. Log in with an account with privileges for the Azure subscription and browse into the subscription in question.
You are greeted with a high-level breakdown, similar to above, of your spending in the current billing period. You can expand any item to get a chart view of spending during the last 10 days.
The Azure Account Portal high-level breakdown (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
The version 1 Azure billing history (Image Credit: Aidan Finn)
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