Azure Cost Optimization Inside-Out_Cloud Architect must have

Explore how Azure billing meters track VM compute hours, IP addresses, disks, and IO, and learn to optimize usage to reduce costs, guided by the usage CSV insights.

Explore how the Azure pricing calculator estimates monthly costs for virtual machines, disks, software licenses, and storage, with options for enterprise agreements and reserved instances.

Learn how Azure Hybrid Benefit reuses eligible licenses on IaaS VMs to cut license costs. Save 40% on Azure VMs and 55% on Azure SQL VMs.

Enable Azure hybrid benefit for Windows and SQL VMs to save up to 49% on licenses by selecting the license during VM creation or updating VMs and verifying OS licensing.

Learn how vm reservations provide discounts for one-year or three-year terms, with upfront or monthly payments, and combining with azure hybrid benefit can save up to 80% of vm costs.

Explore how to create and manage Azure reserved instances, including subscription scope, term length, payment cadence, discounts, and options for size flexibility and capacity priority.

Identify orphaned Azure resources, from VMs to backups, that linger and incur costs, such as disks, IP addresses, snapshots, and App Service plans.

Deallocate virtual machines during off hours to reduce Azure billing by up to 60%, especially for internal and dev test systems, by auto shutdowns or scripts in Azure automation.

Compare pay-as-you-go and enterprise agreements to optimize Azure costs. Enterprise agreements offer 15–20% discounts with a three-year commitment and an EA portal, while upfront payments can also reduce spend.

Create and monitor Azure budgets to track spending by subscription, resource group, or management group, and configure 80% and 90% alerts with email or action group actions for cost control.

Analyze your cloud spend with Azure Cost Management, a free service that helps you identify which resources drive costs, plan optimization, and reserve resources accordingly.

Access cost management in the Azure portal to view billing data, budgets, and Azure Advisor, then analyze costs by subscription, resource, service, and tags.

Explore how VM scale sets automatically scale instances behind a load balancer to match user demand, reducing costs during off-peak periods while noting suitability for certain applications.

Use Burstable VMs for workloads with a low baseline CPU and infrequent requests, such as small databases or dev/test environments, to save costs and burst to max CPU when needed.

Discover how dev test labs enforce cost control and policy guards, auto shut down, shared resources, and per-user limits to optimize Azure dev/test environments.

Learn how the Azure dev test subscription offer reduces development and testing costs with discounted VMs, 55% SQL savings, and 50% discounts on logic apps under an enterprise agreement.

Standardize VM sizes to a chosen series, such as D series or E series, to concentrate VMs and enable reservations for cost savings.

Explore storage reservations and resource reservations to cut costs across azure assets, including vm, app service, and managed disk, with storage savings of 34% and dedicated host savings of 30–40%.

Establish governance in Azure using policies to restrict actions, tag resources by billing account or department, use resource-group logs, and apply cost management for chargeback or showback to control costs.

Learn how Azure PaaS services like App Service, elastic pools, and storage accounts can cut costs by rearchitecting applications and offloading server management.

Explore Azure spot instance VMs, which offer spare data center capacity at up to 80% discount, with eviction notices, so workloads must tolerate disruptions, ideal for batch processing.

Periodically review and migrate to newer Azure VM sizes to improve price performance. Reassess D series options for better cpu-to-memory ratios and cost efficiency.

Analyze network costs alongside compute and licensing, and assess cross-region data transfer expenses to decide whether provisioning redundant VM or service instances in a secondary region saves money.

Save compute costs by using suspend or pause options in specialized services like Insight, Synapse, and SQL Data Warehouse; storage fees apply, enabling savings for large clusters.

Learn how to change storage types to cut costs by switching from premium to standard SSD or standard HDD when resources are idle, and switch back as needed.

Explore Azure storage tiering with hot, cool, and archive tiers to cut costs by data access frequency, moving not accessed data past 30 days or unused data past 180 days.

Discover Azure ephemeral os disks, a temporary storage option with no os storage cost and low latency for stateless workloads. Data is lost when the vm is deallocated.

Learn how disk bursting in Azure lets virtual machines exceed provisioned IOPS and throughput for short bursts, saving costs while managing peak workloads and the 30-minute limit.

Use temp drives on Azure VMs to boost disk throughput for heavy workloads, enabling cost savings by avoiding premium disks, with SQL tempdb as an example.

Explore how Azure container instances reduce costs by running containers without dedicated servers, charging per second for compute and memory, and focusing on workloads that run briefly.

Explore Windows Virtual Desktop pool desktop sessions, instead of provisioning individual VMs, to support many users on one system, reducing compute and IP costs while delivering a secure login experience.