et's continue the journey of Azure Cloud and as we get started with part 2 of the critical parts for cost management, please review the 1st Part of this blog to get the full benefit.

KB Tech World: Cost Management Tips - 10 Things for Azure (Part 1) (kumarbipul.com)
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We would talk about each of them in a bit of detail as well.

Please see the list below we are covering in this part of the blog.

• Spot VMs
• Azure Advisor
• Azure Dev Test labs
• Documentation / Peer Reviews.
• Shutdown/De-allocate VMs

Spot VMs

This applies to ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets.

These Virtual Machines are available at extremely low cost and can be utilized for various scenarios in dev/test/lab environments and there are always scenarios like batch processing, rendering, and transcoding of various key media-related activities.

Don't deploy these Azure Virtual machines in a production environment or any scenario which required highly available machines as these machines could be evicted by Azure Infra with 30 Seconds Notice.

Read more about Spot VMs here - Spot Virtual Machines – Spot Pricing and Features | Microsoft Azure

Azure Advisor

This is all about following and keeping your Azure cloud infrastructure aligned with best practices and which in turn will provide cost-saving and security for your services and products running in Azure cloud.

Azure Advisor is free to use but yes be careful to consider the suggestion/best practices from it for cost perspective. it would provide best practice configuration/personalized actionable recommendations after complete analysis.

Read more about Azure Advisor here - Azure Advisor – Azure Best Practices | Microsoft Azure

Azure DevTest Labs

We all need a Lab environment to validate our proof of concept, testing, and for learning/practice-related purposes. you can create and deploy an entire range of Iass and Paas services using preconfigured artifacts.

You can create these by using ARM Template, via the portal, and with PowerShell as well.

Read more about Azure DevTest Labs here - DevTest Labs | Microsoft Azure.

Documentation / Peer Reviews.

When you are spending your time and effort, it's always a best practice to write a set of documentation.
you can start with a high-level design document (HLD) and describe it with a low-level design document that would cover each and every step of the process and description for the same.

After creating HLD and LLD now you can review it yourself and share them with your team members for Peer review this would further reduce the chance of errors and enhance a more focused approach for deploying Azure services with best practices and cost-effective measures.

Shutdown/De-allocate VMs

When your virtual machines are not running, they are either Stopped or Deallocated

Virtual Machine's State

You can schedule your VMs to shutdown state on a particular/scheduled time this would log out all the users on your virtual machines but will not release any allocated hardware or assigned IPs and in your Azure Portal, you would see the VMs as "Stopped" but this would NOT save you any money here.

You need to stop your VMs through PowerShell/ Azure CLI or via console, this would take your VMs into a "Stopped (deallocated)” state. Now you would save and stop paying for VM's costs other than static IPs.

Conclusion.

In concluding, we covered the last key 5 points which would help you in the long and short term to have perfect Cost Management in Azure. Follow our page for more tech-related blogs – KB Tech World (kumarbipul.com)