The primary reason that corporations are moving to the cloud is to save costs. There is no upfront cost for having an Azure subscription. Azure provides a pay-as-you-go payment mechanism, meaning that payment is based on consumption; Azure measures usage and provides monthly invoices based on your consumption. There is no upper limit for how much you can consume—Azure provides unlimited resources, and anybody with access to Azure can create as many resources as they want. Of course, in such circumstances, it is important for companies to keep a close watch on their Azure consumption. Although they can create policies to set organizational standards and conventions, there is also a need to have Azure billing and consumption information readily available. Moreover, companies should look to employ best practices for consuming Azure resources such that the returns are maximized. For this, architects need to be fully aware of Azure resources and features, their corresponding costs, and to perform cost-benefit comparisons.
In this chapter, we will cover the following:
- Understanding Azure billing
- Invoicing
- Enterprise agreement customers
- Usage and Quotas
- Resource providers
- Usage and Billing APIs
- The Azure pricing models and calculator
- Best practices