AZCOST2 – Azure Cost Optimization

Azure itself offers various tools, that you can use to optimize your infrastructure so that you pay only for what you really need:

1. Azure Advisor
2. Resource Visualizer
3. Azure Cost Management and Billing

Exercise 1: Azure Advisor

The Azure Advisor constantly scan your infrastructure in various aspects of Cost, Security, Reliability, Operational excellence and Performance. As the name already suggest, it does offer you saving potentials by recommending to delete unused resources or acquiring reserved instances.

1. Open the Azure Portal by visiting https://portal.azure.com/#@draphony.de
2. Type Advisor in the search box on the top row of the Azure portal
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3. Select Advisor from the list, which should cause the Portal to open the Azure Advisor.
4. On Cost It should open:
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Assignment 1: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using reserved instances? Discuss in within your team.

Solutions:

1. Pro: saving money, a lot of it.
2. Contra: long-term commitment to usage. What if the solution is stopped?
3. Contra: long-term commitment to a vm family.

Exercise 2: Finding orphaned resources

For IaaS and IaaS related resources, you can use the Azure Resource Visualizer to identify orphaned resources. The ARV shows how they are connected to each other. If you cannot see any connection, that mostlikely this is disconnected and therefore not used.

1. Open the Azure Portal by visiting https://portal.azure.com/#@draphony.de
2. Type Subscriptions in the search box on the top row of the Azure portal
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3. Click on the subscription azu-dx-lza-fenidu.
4. Then click on the Resource Visualizer
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5. You should get a view similiar to the following image
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Assignment 1: Discuss in your group and identify together, which resources are orphaned. What kind of solutions and associated potential risks are involved.

Your Team will get 1 point for each correct resource, associated risks.

Exercise 3: Redesign the solution

We have redesigned the Fenidu solution to leverage cloud-native resources and auto scaling based on the insight we got from the Azure Cost Management and Billing. This kind of optimization requires deep technical design but will reduce the costs significantly.

Assignment 1: Create a new calculation based on the new design.

Assignment 2: Create a new calculation based on the previous design (with the virtual machines) but this time use 3 years reserved instance commitment.

• Azure