10 tips to keep Microsoft Azure Costs down

In the past few weeks, many customers have been coming to my team with billing questions regarding Microsoft Azure.

Since the economic downturn around the world, many customers have been tightening their spending and one of the first expenses to be questioned is the operating costs of IT.

To combat this issue, we’ve been providing some tips to our clients to help reduce costs in Microsoft Azure. Generally, these tips and tricks should be applied as part of an organisation’s cloud strategy.

Here are 10 tips to help your organisation with Azure operating costs.

1. Review your static infrastructure services (IaaS) and power down what is not in use.
2. Turn on auto-shutdown features on Virtual Machines. With Azure Logic Apps, you can have these shutting down and powering up on time schedules.
3. Use Reserved Instances to bring the cost of Virtual Machines down by up to 60%.
4. Right-size your Virtual Machine instances. This is easily achieved in the native Advisor tool.
5. Ensure Virtual Scale Sets are automatically scaling down.
6. Delete orphaned Virtual Machine disks that are no longer in user.
7. Scale down static Virtual Machines that are not seeing as much use.
8. Audit storage accounts to ensure they are in use. Ensure you are using storage tiering where possible.
9. Ensure you’ve disabled any Azure Recovery Services replication services that are no longer required.
10. Review the use network paths and scale down where possible. Services such as Express Route and VPN have the potential to be less utilized at this time.