Microsoft Azure SQL provides a cost-effective and scalable database solution that helps businesses achieve their goals. Microsoft Azure is primarily chosen by a majority of businesses to reduce their costs, as it allows them to save up to 80% or more on their database costs. Azure SQL Database service allows businesses to scale and cost-effectively adapt to changing conditions. Hence it has become the preferred cloud computing service for companies of every size. In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s critical to optimize costs while maintaining performance and reliability. Cost optimization is not just about reducing cloud costs but also about understanding the changes that can be made to maximize the returns on investment.
Some Proven Ways to Optimize Costs
Azure SQL comes with various built-in pricing models as well as numerous tools that facilitate optimizing budgets. However, focused cost optimization that really makes a difference comes with expertise and experience. Organizations while seeking ways to maximize existing resource utilization should reduce waste and unnecessary overheads. Besides, some of the other effective ways to optimize costs on Azure SQL include:
Right-size your Azure SQL Instance – Azure SQL comes with various performance tiers, where each tier has different levels of CPU, memory, and I/O capabilities. Organizations by choosing the right performance tier for the workload can optimize costs and avoid over-provisioning. They can also use an auto-scale to add or delete machines as needed to match changes in demand. Auto scale defines how Azure VM’s compute, memory, network, and storage capacities continuously increase or decrease depending upon the changing requirements of the workload. This not only improves performance but also reduces operating costs.
Continuous Azure Cost Monitoring and Optimization – Businesses after setting up Azure cost monitoring should continuously keep it running. Azure has a dynamic cloud so resource utilization and related costs change constantly. With continuous monitoring businesses can quickly identify the root cause of cost anomalies in real-time, enabling them to fix the issues and prevent them from becoming expensive problems.
Move from traditional Database to Elastic Databases – Using traditional databases like MS SQL or other database servers on Azure can prove quite expensive, and the costs increase rather quickly. Virtual Machines are often expensive and database instances are less likely to utilize in an optimal way. This makes database Virtual Machines inappropriate for the simple way of load distribution between instances, especially for companies that are looking to cut the overall Azure costs. Thus moving to elastic databases is the best solution for many organizations and companies that move to Azure SQL and experience a substantial reduction in costs. The reduction in cost is more due to the dynamic payment method where companies are only paying for the database resources that they are using at that moment, allowing cost-effectiveness on a comprehensive level.
Understand Azure Cloud Costs – Organizations need to understand exactly where their Azure spending is going because most cloud management tools just aggregate, visualize, and report total costs and averages. Besides, organizations after knowing their previous month’s high Azure costs are tempted to lower their Azure spending on the following month rather than optimizing it. Instead of looking at average costs organizations should see the cost per unit and the amount spent on each customer. This approach will help them gather actionable insights like the amount they need to charge for their service to earn a healthy profit.
Shut Down Unused Resources – Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine automatic shutdown feature helps an organization to minimize operating costs by automatically shutting down idle or unused VMs after they sit idle for a specific duration. This further helps to optimize costs and resource use while virtual machines are running.
Right Size VMs for Best Performance – Virtual Machines come with various hardware and performance capabilities and usually teams configure the highest performing VMs anticipating more need of power in the future. However, with Azure VMs teams can find the optimal VM for their workload that provides maximum performance at the lowest costs. Today, organizations just need a few clicks to increase or decrease the amount of capacity they need to smoothly run their application in the cloud. Organizations can also utilize auto-scaling for adjusting the VMs number according to actual workloads.
Move Workloads to Containers – Containers when compared to VMs has far more lightweight workload architecture. Organizations depending on their workflow and resources can run several containerized applications on a physical host and even manage dozens of containers per host. Organizations can reduce the use of VMs by repackaging their applications as containers which will further reduce their costs.
Make Use of Storage Tier – Storage accounts for the major share of the ongoing Azure costs and so organizations need to optimize this aspect of Azure deployment to bring significant reductions in overheads. Azure comes with diverse storage tiers, each having apt pricing per GB a month. Thus, organizations can use the right storage tier for the right type of data like they can store data that they access less frequently on a lower-cost tier will prove cost-effective, as it will decrease monthly costs and also lead to significant cost reduction in the long run.
Azure SQL provides a cost-effective and scalable database solution that helps organizations to optimize costs while maintaining performance and reliability. By using these eight optimization strategies, organizations can reduce costs and improve efficiency, which helps them achieve their business goals.