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5 Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make When You Optimize Azure

By Heather Robinette

As Brian mentioned in one of our previous blogs, “One of the main motives for companies moving to the cloud is the potential for significant cost savings.” Additionally, in order to continually increase their savings in the cloud and add to their profit margins, companies should look to remove wasteful spending in the cloud. Below we discuss five mistakes that you can’t afford to make when you are optimizing your Azure spending

 

Mistake #1: Not Checking for Unattached Disk Storage 

Microsoft has created measures to help save your data in the event of an unintentional removal of a virtual machine. Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword. While they may be trying to save your data in the event of accidental deletion, when you delete it on purpose, you will continue to pay for the unattached storage. Due to the flexibility and scalability of the cloud, you can delete a virtual machine at any moment. Thus, you will need to periodically check to see if you have any charges for your deleted resources. It is also a best practice to review your resources and Azure spend to help you keep off any unneeded costs from your bill.  

 

Mistake #2: Not Creating a Budget  

It is always a good idea to have a budget when you are spending money. Tracking what you are spending and how much you are spending on it is a good way to reduce any unnecessary expenditures. Cloud spending can be costly by itself, and you could be spending more without needing to. By creating a budget, you can understand your cloud spending and what resources have the most significant expenses. Over time, you can start to see if any trends emerge and if you need to make any adjusts to your environment.  

 

Mistake #3: Not Having the Correct Resource Size  

Optimizing your spending starts with having your virtual machines at the correct size. Reducing the amount of unused space has the biggest impact on reducing your spending. As we have discussed in a previous blog, right-sizing is about finding the optimal cloud configuration to maximize your performance at the lowest cost. Developers that are not used to Azure frequently create virtual machines that are much bigger than needed. Usually, this is due to one of two reasons, to see the capabilities of Azure or on accident as they are new to the Azure platform. A larger resource will come with a cost, and it’s not one you want to pay if it is not cost-effective for you. By reviewing metrics like the disk, memory, and CPU, you can find the best way to get the right-size for your resource.  

 

Mistake #4: Not investigating the B Series VMs 

To fully optimize your Azure spend, you can investigate downgrading specific virtual machines to the B-Series. The B-Series VMs can offer an efficient method to use and deploy workloads that do not require the full performance of the CPU continuously. If you describe your users as typically office users and not power users, then the B Series VMs are worth considering. We recommend looking into them only if you have resources that do not need to run 24x7.  

 

Mistake #5: Not Having Right-Sized Disk Storage  

Similar to not having right-sized resources, not having right-sized disk storage can hurt your bottom line. As mentioned earlier, removing unattached disks helps reduce costs; however, having right-sized disk storage is another way to reduce costs. Microsoft has two types of storage that virtual machines can utilize. A standard storage performance tier and a premium storage performance tier. The standard tier has three different sizes to it, while the premium has three different sizes. There is a price difference that can be almost as high as 3X between the two, so determining which size storage for each workload will help you optimize your cloud spend.  

 

We hope you can avoid these mistakes when you are optimizing your cloud spend in Microsoft Azure. If you have any questions or there is anything we can help you with, feel free to reach out to us via chat or our Contact Us form 

 

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Tags: Microsoft Azure, Cost Optimization

azure cost optimization

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