If you are signing up for a new Azure cloud account or adding a new resource or service or hardware, you should calculate cost of the resource or service. You may also want to make sure you take advantage of various cost savings available in Azure cloud.
Azure Pricing Calculator allows you to calculate cost of Azure products and services. In this article, we will learn how to use Azure Pricing Calculator to estimate Azure product costs.
If you like learning from videos, here is the video on this article,
You can Google Azure Pricing Calculator or visit direct this URL to access Azure Pricing Calculator.
Azure Pricing Calculator home page looks like the following where you can search a product or you can select a category in the left side and available products will be loaded in the right side of the page. For example, on the default page for me, I see Virtual Machines, Storage Accounts, Azure SQL Database, App Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Functions, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Cost Management and Billing options.
Now, let’s calculate pricing of Azure SQL Database service.
Click on Azure SQL Database link on the above screen.
You will notice, the message Azure SQL Database is added. This means, the option is added to Your Estimates.
Click on View link. You will go to Your Estimates tab. See below.
On Your Estimates tab, you will see all of your available estimates and even previously estimates will be saved on this page. You can also delete your previously calculated estimates.
As you can see from the above screen, the default options for Azure SQL database are added for me where Region is East US, Type is Single Database, Backup Storage Tier, Purchase Model, Service Tier, Compute Tier, Hardware Type, and Instance options.
The pricing will change based on the options you select on this screen. For example, I changed Service Tier to Business Critical and Instance to 32 vCore.
As you can see from the above screen, the monthly price is changed from $1476.43 to $$15,879.60.
So, it is important to know about what type of product you need for your application to run. As a rule of thumb in cloud pricing is, you do not want to overestimate the resources. You can always go back and upgrade these options if you need more resources.
Now, let us go back and check pricing for an App Service. An App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling a web app. In other words, if you want to host a Web application or website, you will create an App Service.
Let us assume, we have an ASP.NET Core website and we want to deploy on a shared tier. Go ahead and click on App Service box on the above page.
You will see an App Service is added to Your Estimates with default region, operating system, tier, and instance. Changing these options will change the price of the service.
As you can see from the above screen, I’ve region selected East US, Windows operating system and tier is Basic and 1 instance of B1: 1 Core(s), 1.75GB RAM, 10GB storage and the monthly price of the app service is $54.75.
Now, if you go and change any of the above options, the price will be changed. I go ahead and change Tier to Shared. Now monthly cost is $9.49.
Below the above screen, you will also notice a Support option with Export, Save and Share buttons. Microsoft has three paid supports as you can see on the below screen.
The monthly cost varies from support type.
Cost of Developer support is $29 per month, Standard support is $100 per month, and Professional Direct support is $1,000 per month.
Below that, you can use Export option to export your estimates into an Excel file.
Please note, before getting the accurate pricing of Azure products, you must have in-depth knowledge of various options related to that product. For example, if you want to buy Azure SQL database, you must know the storage, how many processors, location, tier, other options.
Once you have purchased your Azure products and have started using them, it is important to analyze and monitor costs and spending.
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