Saving Money on Your IAAS Project with Azure

Many customers that we speak to think that when they migrate or lift and shift into Azure that it is a similar set up to their current on-premise servers. This leads to the question; how can we save money on our cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) implementations if they are the same?

The simple answer is, they are not the same. When you migrate, you’re not running hardware servers on prem, but are running VMs in the cloud that are highly scalable and that we can switch around. How you can save money is 3-fold:

1.  Not all VMs are created equal in Azure. There are many different servers of VMs, such as memory optimize or compute optimize servers, so you can choose the one that’s right for the workloads you are running. What you run in the cloud may not match what you’re running on your on prem servers. Maybe you have a server that you tugged out with tons of CPU and memory, but it’s just the memory that you need to use. That’s what you should target when you move to the cloud.

2.  Running during non-peak times. Do all your servers work on the weekend, using the level of compute and memory that they have during the week? In Azure, you can put in processes to scale these down during these non-peak times, saving on compute and cost.

3.  Use dev test labs. This great feature within Azure can save on licensing costs. For example, a SQL Server, product or windows licensing is going to be free or reduced. Since it’s a development server, you’re not paying for the SQL Server license that’s built into that server as it’s running. Additionally, dev test labs have easy ways, without writing any scripting, to set up timers to automatically shut off the servers when developers go home for the day.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can save money on your IAAS cost with Azure, or have questions on anything Azure related, click the link below or contact us – our experts are here with answers to all your questions.