Azure Costs

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator

Calculate

Working with the TCO Calculator involves three steps:

  • Define your workloads.
  • Adjust assumptions.
  • View the report.

First, you enter the specifications of your on-premises infrastructure into the TCO Calculator, based on these four categories:

Servers

This category includes operating systems, virtualization methods, CPU cores, and memory (RAM).

Databases

This category includes database types, server hardware, and the Azure service you want to use, which includes the expected maximum concurrent user sign-ins.

Storage

This category includes storage type and capacity, which includes any backup or archive storage.

Networking

This category includes the amount of network bandwidth you currently consume in your on-premises environment.

Purchase Azure services

Type of subscriptions:

  • Free trial
  • Pas-as-you-go
  • Member offers

How do I purchase Azure services?

  • Through an Enterprise Agreement
  • Directly from the web
  • Through a Cloud Solution Provider

What factors affect cost?

  • Resource type
  • Usage meters
  • Resource usage
  • Azure subscription types
  • Azure Marketplace

Does location or network traffic affect cost?

Different regions can have different associated prices. Because geographic regions can impact where your network traffic flows, network traffic is a cost influence to consider as well.

Zones for billing of network traffic

A zone is a geographical grouping of Azure regions for billing purposes. The following zones include some of the regions as shown here:

  • Zone 1: Australia Central, West US, East US, Canada West, West Europe, France Central, and others
  • Zone 2: Australia East, Japan West, Central India, Korea South, and others
  • Zone 3: Brazil South, South Africa North, South Africa West, UAE Central, UAE North DE Zone 1: Germany Central, Germany Northeast

Estimate workload cost by using the Pricing calculator

Pricing calculator

  • Define your requirements first

Manage and minimize total cost on Azure:

  • Understand estimated costs before you deploy
  • Use Azure Advisor to monitor your usage
  • Use spending limits to restrict your spending
  • Use Azure Reservations to prepay
    • Azure Reservations can save you up to 72 percent as compared to pay-as-you-go prices. To receive a discount, you reserve services and resources by paying in advance
  • Choose low-cost locations and regions
  • Research available cost-saving offers
  • Use Azure Cost Management + Billing to control spending
  • Apply tags to identify cost owners
  • Resize underutilized virtual machines
  • Deallocate virtual machines during off hours
  • Delete unused resources
  • Migrate from IaaS to PaaS services
  • Save on licensing costs
    • Choose cost-effective operating systems
  • Use Azure Hybrid Benefit to repurpose software licenses on Azure. Available if your licenses are covered by Software Assurance