Introduction
At CloudBolt, we get questions every day from advanced DevOps engineers and
technical managers about how to best optimize Microsoft Azure cloud spending.
As Azure administration experts, their questions aren't about the service
functionalities but instead about the ever-expanding pricing models and the
industry best practices to safely reduce their monthly bill without compromising
service performance.
There were over 1 million permutations as of the writing of this article
1
CloudBolt Industry Insights Report:
The DevOps Guide to Azure Costs
Public clouds gained popularity over the last decade mainly because of their
simplicity and convenience; however, the basic Azure virtual machine gradually evolved to support multiple instance
families, types, and versions, translating into hundreds of thousands of configuration permutations and purchasing
plans. The resulting complexity confuses even the most experienced cloud administrators.
In this guide, we clarify the pricing options, summarize the concepts into tables and diagrams, and share industry best
practices for safely reducing your spending.
We have created this guide to publicly share our responses to the most common questions involving popular Azure
concepts such as migration, storage, spot, reservations, and SQL pricing.
