az-900-notes

4. Describe Azure Pricing, Service Level Agreements, and Lifecycles (20-25%)

4.1. Describe Azure subscriptions

4.1.A. describe an Azure Subscription

An Azure subscription is a logical unit of Azure services that links to an Azure account, which is an identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) or in a directory that an Azure AD trusts.

4.1.B. describe the uses and options with Azure subscriptions such access control and offer types

Create additional Azure subscriptions to separate:

Billing

azure billing

Offer types

4.1.C. describe subscription management using Management groups

The organizing structure for resources in Azure has four levels: management groups, subscriptions, resource groups, and resources.

azure hierarchy-structure

Management group (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/management-groups/overview)

4.2. Describe planning and management of costs

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/

4.2.A. describe options for purchasing Azure products and services

There are three main customer types on which the available purchasing options for Azure products and services is contingent, including:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/purchase-options/

4.2.B. describe options around Azure Free account

An Azure free account provides subscribers with 12 months of our most popular services, a credit to explore any Azure service for 30 days, and over 25 services are free.

Do you pay anything to start with the Azure free account? No. Starting is free, plus you get a credit you can spend during the first 30 days.

What do you need to sign up for a free account? All you need is a phone number, a credit or debit card, and a GitHub account or Microsoft account username (formerly Windows Live ID).

What happens once you use my free credit or I’m at the end of 30 days? We’ll notify you so you can decide if you want to upgrade to pay-as-you-go pricing and remove the spending limit. If you do, you’ll have access to all the free products. If you don’t, your account and products will be disabled, and you’ll need to upgrade to resume usage.

What happens at the end of the 12 months of free products? For 12 months after you upgrade your account, certain amounts of popular products for compute, networking, storage, and databases are free. After 12 months, any of these products you may be using will continue to run, and you’ll be billed at the standard pay-as-you-go rates.

4.2.C. describe the factors affecting costs such as resource types, services, locations, ingress and egress traffic

Usage meters The meters track the resources’ usage, and each meter generates a usage record that is used to calculate your bill.

What type data transfer is charged by Availability Zones data transfer meters?

Following Availability Zone data transfer is charged:

Following Availability Zone data transfer is NOT charged:

Is data transfer between Azure services located within the same region charged?

No. For example, an Azure SQL database in the same region will not have any additional data transfer costs.

Is data transfer between Azure services located in two regions charged?

Yes. Outbound data transfer is charged at the normal rate and inbound data transfer is free.

4.2.D. describe Zones for billing purposes

A Zone is a geographical grouping of Azure Regions for billing purposes. the following Zones exist and include the sample regions as listed below:

The term Zone is for billing purposes only, and the full-term Availability Zone refers to the failure protection that Azure provides for datacenters.

4.2.E. describe the Pricing calculator (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/)

4.2.F. describe the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/tco/)

4.2.G. describe best practices for minimizing Azure costs such as performing cost analysis, creating spending limits and quotas, using tags to identify cost owners, using Azure reservations and using Azure Advisor recommendations

Perform cost analyses

Monitor usage with Azure Advisor

Use spending limits

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-spending-limit

Use Azure Reservations

Example: If you have virtual machine workloads that are static and predictable, using reserved instances is a fantastic way to potentially save up to 70 to 80 percent off the pay-as-you-go cost.

Choose low-cost locations and regions

Research available cost-saving offers

Apply tags to identify cost owners

Save on infrastructure costs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/predict-costs-and-optimize-spending/4-save-on-infrastructure-costs
Save on licensing costs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/predict-costs-and-optimize-spending/5-save-on-licensing-costs

4.2.H. describe Azure Cost Management (https://azure.microsoft.com/services/cost-management)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/cost-management-billing/

Cost Management is an Azure product that provides a set of tools for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing your Azure costs.

The main features of the Azure Cost Management toolset include:

4.3. Describe Azure Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

4.3.A. describe a Service Level Agreement (SLA) (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/support/legal/sla/summary/)

Service Credits

Monthly uptime percentage Service credit percentage
< 99.9 10
< 99 25
< 95 100

4.3.B. describe Composite SLAs

Example:

4.3.C. describe how to determine an appropriate SLA for an application

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/learn/modules/explore-azure-service-level-agreements/5-define-application-sla

Considerations for defining application SLAs

4.4. Describe service lifecycle in Azure

4.4.A. describe Public and Private Preview features

Azure Previews

https://preview.portal.azure.com/
or any service name which has (Preview)

4.4.B. describe the term General Availability (GA)

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/topics/announcements/

4.4.C. describe how to monitor feature updates and product changes

Azure updates page (https://azure.microsoft.com/updates) has information about the latest updates to Azure products, services, and features, as well as product roadmaps and announcements.