3 years ago

Category: Business, Security

Recently, we provided an overview of how to approach cost optimization on Microsoft Azure, which laid out three focus areas to help you get the most value out of your Azure investment: understanding and forecasting your costs, optimizing your workload costs, and controlling your costs. Today, we’ll dive more deeply into the second focus area—how you can optimize your Azure workloads costs—and show you how guidance in the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework, tools like Azure Advisor, and offers like the Azure Hybrid Benefit and Azure Reservations can help you operate more efficiently on Azure and save.

Azure Advisor is a free service that helps you optimize your already-deployed Azure resources for cost, security, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.

The Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that lets you bring your Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises licenses with Software Assurance or subscriptions to Azure and save up to 85 percent compared to standard pay as-you-go rates,1 so you only pay for the compute costs on Azure.

For your heavily-virtualized workloads, you get four vCPUs of Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance for each core of SQL Server Enterprise.