The way you use resources, your subscription type, and pricing from third-party vendors have an impact on the cost of your Azure implementation. Among these factors that affect your costs are resource type, usage meters, resource usage, Azure subscription types, and Azure Marketplace. Let's take a quick look at each of these. A number of factors influence the cost of Azure resources, they depend on the type of resource or how you customize it. For example, with the storage account, you specify a type, such as a block blob storage or table storage, a performance tier, standard or premium, and an axis tier, hot, cool, or archive. These selections present different costs. When you provision a resource, Azure creates meters to track usage of that resource. Azure uses these meters to generate a usage record that's later used to help calculate your bill. Think of usage meters similar to how you use electricity or water in your home. You might pay a base price each month for electricity or water service, but your final bill is based on the total amount that you consumed. Let's look at a single VM as an example. The following kinds of meters are relevant to tracking its usage, overall CPU time, time spent with a public IP address, incoming ingress or outgoing egress, network traffic in and out of the VM, disk size and amount of disk read and disk write operations. Each meter tracks a specific type of usage. For example, a meter might track bandwidth usage, ingress or egress network traffic in bits per second, number of operations or its size, storage capacity, and bites. The usage that a meter tracks correlates to a quantity of billable units. Those units are charged to your account for each billing period. The rate per billable unit depends on the resource type you're using. In Azure, you're always charged based on what you use. As an example, let's look at how this billing applies to de-allocating a VM. To reduce costs, you can delete or de-allocate a VM. Deleting a VM means that you no longer needed, the VM is removed from your subscription and is no longer available. De-allocating a VM means that the VM is no longer running, but the associated hard-disks and data are still kept in Azure. The VM isn't assigned to a CPU or network and Azure's data center, so it doesn't generate the costs associated with Compute Time or the VM's IP address. Because the discs and data are still stored and the resource is present in your Azure subscription, you're still build for disk storage, de-allocating a VM when you don't plan on using it for some time is just one way to minimize costs. For example, you might de-allocate the VMs you use for testing purposes on weekends when you're testing team isn't using them. You'll learn more about ways to minimize cost later in this module. Some Azure subscription types also include usage allowances which affect costs. For example, an Azure free trial subscription provides access to a number of Azure products that are free for 12 months. It also includes credit to spend within your first 30 days of sign-up and you get access to more than 25 products that are always free based on resource and region availability. You can also purchase Azure-based solutions and services from third-party vendors through Azure Marketplace. Examples include managed network firewall appliances or connectors to third-party backup services. Billing structures are set by the vendor. When you provision a resource in Azure, you need to define the location known as the Azure region, where it will be deployed. Let's see why this decision can have cost consequences. Azure infrastructure is distributed globally, which enables you to deploy your services centrally or provision your services closest to where your customers use them. Different regions can have different associated prices. Because geographic regions can impact where your network traffic flows, network traffic is a constant fluence to consider as well. For example, say Tailwind traders decide to provision its Azure resources in the Azure regions that offer the lowest prices. That decision would save the company some money. But if they need to transfer data between those regions or if their users are located in different parts of the world, any potential savings could be offset by the additional network usage cost of transferring data between those resources. Billing zones are a factor in determining the cost of some Azure services. Bandwidth refers to data moving in and out of Azure data centers. Some inbound data transfers, data going into Azure data centers, are free. For outbound data transfers, data leaving Azure data centers, data transfer pricing is based on zones. 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 to West, Canada West, West Europe, Friends 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. As you've learned, an accurate cost estimate takes all of the preceding factors into account. Fortunately, the Azure pricing calculator helps you with that process. The pricing calculator displays Azure products and categories. You add these categories to your estimate and configure them according to your specific requirements. You then receive a consolidated estimated price with a detailed breakdown of the costs associated with each resource you added to your solution. You can export or share that estimate or save it for later. You can load a saved estimate and modify it to match updated requirements. You also can access pricing details, product details, and documentation for each product from within the pricing calculator. A region is the geographical location in which you can provision a service. Southeast Asia, Western United States, and Northern Europe are a few examples. Tiers such as the free tier or basic tier, have different levels of availability or performance in different associated costs. Billing options highlight the different ways you can pay for a service. Options can vary based on your customer type and subscription type and can include options to save costs. Support options enable you to select additional support pricing options for certain services. In programs and offers, your customer or subscription type might enable you to choose from specific licensing programs or other offers. Azure dev-test pricing lists the available prices for development and test workloads. Dev-test pricing applies when you run resources within an Azure subscription that's based on a dev-test offer. Keep in mind that the pricing calculator provides estimates and not actual price quotes. Actual prices can vary depending upon the date of purchase, the payment currency you're using, and the type of Azure customer you are.
