Azure Budgeting & Cost Management

Azure Pricing, Cost Management + Billing, Azure Advisor, Spending limit, Support Plans, SLA

Hitesh Sahu

Mon Sep 29 2025

Pricing

Pricing Model

1. Free trial

12 months of popular free services,
credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days,
25 services that are always free.

2. Pay-as-you-go

Pay for service used
volume discounts and prepaid invoicing.
Save on 1-3 Year Reservation offers upto 70% discounted prices.

3. Member offers

Reduced rate & credit for Existing membership to MS products & services

Azure Pricing Factors:

Resource size and resource type.
Different Azure locations have different prices for services.
The bandwidth of your services.
Any data transfer between two different billing zones is charged.
- Ingress (data in) = free
- Egress (data out) = charged based on data going out of Azure datacenters

Total Cost Ownership(TCO)

Create report of cost of owning & running Server https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/tco/calculator/

Compare cost of running Server, Storage, network & Labour in Private Server vs AWS
Good for presentation to show cost saving on moving to AWS

Cost Management + Billing

Central Dashboard for all Billing

Analyzing costs, creating & managing budgets, exporting data, and reviewing and acting on recommendations.

Azure Advisor-> AWS Trusted Advisor

Analyzes configurations & offers personalized, actionable recommendations at no additional cost.

identifies unused or underutilized resources & recommends unused resources that can be removed.

Parameters

Cost
Security
Reliability
Operational Excellence
Performance

Azure spending limit-> AWS Budget

Prevents spending over credit amount to avoid accidental billing

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit
Once spending limit is exhausted the services are disabled for the rest of that billing period.

Azure Support Plans

1. Basic

included for all Azure customers.

2. Developer

recommended for non-production environments.

Limited access to technical support during business hours by email only.

3. Standard

appropriate for production workload environments.

24/7 access to Azure’s technical support engineers by phone or email.

4. Professional Direct

suitable for business-critical workloads.

Has 24/7 access to Azure’s technical support engineers by phone or email.
Provides access to Operations Support, ProDirect delivery managers, and Support APIs.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

It is the commitment of Microsoft for the uptime and connectivity of a service.

Service credit is given if the SLA is not met by Microsoft.

Composite SLAs

Combining SLAs across different service offerings, the resultant SLA is a called a Composite SLA.

The resulting composite SLA can provide higher or lower uptime values, depending on your application architecture.
Application that relies on multiple services has more potential failure points.
To increase SLA distribute the application in more than one region for high availability & use Azure Traffic Manager for failover if one region fails.
```
  App Service web apps = 99.95% 
  SQL Database = 99.99%
  Composite SLA = 99.95% × 99.99% = 99.94%.
```

Service Lifecycle

1. Private Preview

only available to a few customers for early access to new technologies and features.

2. Public Preview

Can be used by any customers to evaluate the new features but SLA does not apply.

3. General Availability

Release of service to the general public and is fully supported by SLAs.

Appendix

Cost controls	AWS	Azure	Google Cloud
Long-term commitment discount programs	EC2 Reserved Instances, Savings Plans	Reservations, Azure Hybrid Benefit	Committed use discounts, sustained use discounts
Low-cost, interruptible VMs	EC2 Spot	Azure Spot Virtual Machines	Preemptible Virtual Machines
Optimization tools	Amazon CodeGuru, Amazon DevOps Guru, AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Well-Architected Tool	Azure Advisor, Azure Well-Architected Review	Recommender, Network Intelligence Center, Cloud Profiler
Spending tracker and analysis	AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Reserved Instance Reporting	Azure Cost Management and Billing	Cost Management

Azure Budgeting & Cost Management

Azure Pricing, Cost Management + Billing, Azure Advisor, Spending limit, Support Plans, SLA

Hitesh Sahu

Mon Sep 29 2025

Pricing

Pricing Model

1. Free trial

12 months of popular free services,
credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days,
25 services that are always free.

2. Pay-as-you-go

Pay for service used
volume discounts and prepaid invoicing.
Save on 1-3 Year Reservation offers upto 70% discounted prices.

3. Member offers

Reduced rate & credit for Existing membership to MS products & services

Azure Pricing Factors:

Resource size and resource type.
Different Azure locations have different prices for services.
The bandwidth of your services.
Any data transfer between two different billing zones is charged.
- Ingress (data in) = free
- Egress (data out) = charged based on data going out of Azure datacenters

Total Cost Ownership(TCO)

Create report of cost of owning & running Server https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/tco/calculator/

Compare cost of running Server, Storage, network & Labour in Private Server vs AWS
Good for presentation to show cost saving on moving to AWS

Cost Management + Billing

Central Dashboard for all Billing

Analyzing costs, creating & managing budgets, exporting data, and reviewing and acting on recommendations.

Azure Advisor-> AWS Trusted Advisor

Analyzes configurations & offers personalized, actionable recommendations at no additional cost.

identifies unused or underutilized resources & recommends unused resources that can be removed.

Parameters

Cost
Security
Reliability
Operational Excellence
Performance

Azure spending limit-> AWS Budget

Prevents spending over credit amount to avoid accidental billing

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit
Once spending limit is exhausted the services are disabled for the rest of that billing period.

Azure Support Plans

1. Basic

included for all Azure customers.

2. Developer

recommended for non-production environments.

Limited access to technical support during business hours by email only.

3. Standard

appropriate for production workload environments.

24/7 access to Azure’s technical support engineers by phone or email.

4. Professional Direct

suitable for business-critical workloads.

Has 24/7 access to Azure’s technical support engineers by phone or email.
Provides access to Operations Support, ProDirect delivery managers, and Support APIs.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

It is the commitment of Microsoft for the uptime and connectivity of a service.

Service credit is given if the SLA is not met by Microsoft.

Composite SLAs

Combining SLAs across different service offerings, the resultant SLA is a called a Composite SLA.

The resulting composite SLA can provide higher or lower uptime values, depending on your application architecture.
Application that relies on multiple services has more potential failure points.
To increase SLA distribute the application in more than one region for high availability & use Azure Traffic Manager for failover if one region fails.
```
  App Service web apps = 99.95% 
  SQL Database = 99.99%
  Composite SLA = 99.95% × 99.99% = 99.94%.
```

Service Lifecycle

1. Private Preview

only available to a few customers for early access to new technologies and features.

2. Public Preview

Can be used by any customers to evaluate the new features but SLA does not apply.

3. General Availability

Release of service to the general public and is fully supported by SLAs.

Appendix

Cost controls	AWS	Azure	Google Cloud
Long-term commitment discount programs	EC2 Reserved Instances, Savings Plans	Reservations, Azure Hybrid Benefit	Committed use discounts, sustained use discounts
Low-cost, interruptible VMs	EC2 Spot	Azure Spot Virtual Machines	Preemptible Virtual Machines
Optimization tools	Amazon CodeGuru, Amazon DevOps Guru, AWS Compute Optimizer, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Well-Architected Tool	Azure Advisor, Azure Well-Architected Review	Recommender, Network Intelligence Center, Cloud Profiler
Spending tracker and analysis	AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Reserved Instance Reporting	Azure Cost Management and Billing	Cost Management