If you’re new to Azure and want a better understanding of how much it’s going to cost you to operate a workload in Azure, I’d like to tell you about a great tool called the Azure Pricing Calculator.
Even if you’re already using Azure, the Pricing Calculator is a nice tool for simulating and understanding what it would cost if you were going to change your environment to use different services or if wanted to try adding a new service.
Let me tell you how it works:
- The Azure Pricing Calculator is a web-based tool that you can access by going to Azure.com in your browser or do a search for the tool.
- If you’re in Azure.com (see screenshot) and you click on the pricing link, you’ll have a button at the bottom that will take you to the Pricing Calculator.
- When you open you Pricing Calculator, you’ll get to this page here:
- Here, you’ll want to select the first product or service that you want to include in your estimate. You can do a search for the products in the Azure platform in the search bar or you can navigate using the black boxes on the left.
- For my example, I want to include an Azure SQL Database which is a choice in the top row.
- To start creating my estimate, I select the Azure SQL Database, and this takes me to the page shown here where I can start entering information about my database.
- At the top you can enter a name; by default, it says ‘your estimate’ but you can name it whatever you want like if you’re working on specific project for example.
- I’ve named mine Bob’s Estimate. As I’m picking an Azure SQL Database, I’m given options that pertain to that, so I must choose a region, what type of database, what service tier I want to use, etc. – things that apply to this database.
- Once I’ve made my selections it will compute the price for this particular service and will add that price at the bottom.
- I can also add additional resources to my estimate. For this example, I’ve added an Azure SQL Data Warehouse just as a quick example.
- The Azure SQL Data Warehouse offers you the ability to choose a compute tier and then pay for your storage. That’s all separate so they ask you for estimates on both of those components of the Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
- The point here is depending upon the resources you want to provision or get an estimate for it’s going to prompt you with different options that pertain just to that feature. So, it’s a nice way to see how everything is priced and to get an estimate of how it’s going to look in your environment.
- Once you’re done making the selections about the components you want to include in your estimate, you can scroll to the bottom for options for saving or exporting it. Saving it will save it to the portal, so you can come back and edit and change it as you need.
- You can also clone it and create a couple different estimates with some small variations.
- Another option is to export it which will dump this out to an Excel file, then you can email it and share it with your organization.
The Azure Pricing Calculator is a very useful tool, whether you're just starting out or need estimates for adding services to your environment, it's a great way to better understand cost. If you have any questions about the Azure Pricing Calculator or the Azure platform in general, you’re in the right place. Click the link below or contact us—we’re here and ready to help you take your business from good to great.