Factors that can affect costs in Azure

Azure shifts development costs from the capital expense (CapEx) of building out and maintaining infrastructure and facilities to an operational expense (OpEx) of renting infrastructure as you need it, whether it’s compute, storage, networking, and so on.
OpEx cost can be impacted by many factors. Some of the impacting factors are:
- Resource type
- Consumption
- Maintenance
- Geography
- Subscription type
- Azure Marketplace

Resource type

The type of resources, the settings for the resource, and the Azure region will all have an impact on how much a resource costs.
When you provision an Azure resource, Azure creates metered instances for that resource. The meters track the resources' usage and generate a usage record that is used to calculate your bill.
Example
- With a storage account, you specify a type such as blob, a performance tier, an access tier, redundancy settings, and a region
- With a virtual machine (VM), you may have to consider licensing for the operating system or other software, the processor and number of cores for the VM, the attached storage, and the network interface.

Pay-as-you-go is the cloud payment model where you pay for the resources that you use during a billing cycle
Azure also offers the ability to commit to using a set amount of cloud resources in advance and receiving discounts on those “reserved” resources. Many services, including databases, compute, and storage all provide the option to commit to a level of use and receive a discount, in some cases up to 72 percent.
When you reserve capacity, you’re committing to using and paying for a certain amount of Azure resources during a given period (typically one or three years)

In order to control costs, it’s important to maintain your cloud environment.
By keeping an eye on your resources and making sure you’re not keeping around resources that are no longer needed, you can help control cloud costs.
For example, every time you provision a VM, additional resources such as storage and networking are also provisioned. If you deprovision the VM, those additional resources may not deprovision at the same time, either intentionally or unintentionally.

When you provision most resources in Azure, you need to define a region where the resource deploys.
The cost of power, labor, taxes, and fees vary depending on the location. Due to these variations, Azure resources can differ in costs to deploy depending on the region.
Network Traffic
- Some inbound data transfers (data going into Azure datacenters) are free.
- For outbound data transfers (data leaving Azure datacenters), data transfer pricing is based on zones. A zone is a geographical grouping of Azure regions for billing purposes.

Some Azure subscription types also include usage allowances, which affect costs.
Azure free trial subscription
- Some Azure products that are free for 12 months
- Includes credit to spend within your first 30 days of sign-up
- More than 25 products that are always free (based on resource and region availability).

Azure Marketplace lets you purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors.
When you purchase products through Azure Marketplace, you may pay for Azure services that you’re using, and also for the services or expertise of the third-party vendor. Billing structures are set by the vendor.
All solutions available in Azure Marketplace are certified and compliant with Azure policies and standards.

Depends on many factors such as services used, workloads, networking needs, and storage requirements.
Azure provides several tools to help you understand your costs and savings when moving to the cloud.
Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO, Calculator helps you understand the cost savings of operating your solution on Azure compared to your on-premises data center.
- Define your workloads by specifying your current on-premises infrastructure based on service, databases, storage, and networking.
- Then you can make adjustments to costs based on your location and organization. Finally, you can view a report that shows your costs and savings over time.
Pricing Calculator, which can help you determine which Azure services best fit your budget. As you select your subscriptions, services, resources, and third-party solutions, you can add up your costs. You can make adjustments for regions, billing options, Dev/Test pricing, and support options. This can give you a good estimate of the costs of your plans.
To monitor your actual costs, you can use the Azure Advisor. It can make recommendations around unused resources and ways to optimize your services.
You can also set spending limits on your costs to prevent accidental cost overruns. By using these tools, you can monitor your costs while tracking your overall long-term savings of moving to the cloud.