Azure Reservation Management:

 

Introduction: this article is a continuation of a series of articles on Azure services beginning with the signal R that was written earlier than this. In this article, we explore assure resource reservations available for cost management and billing. One of the advantages of using Azure public cloud is that it provides complete visibility into the building and cost aspects of requesting resources from its portfolio of services and the usages are also continuously monitored which helps both plan and predict for future expenses using Microsoft cloud businesses can now trim their inefficiencies an analyze manage and optimize the costs on workload by workload basis this suite of services helps ensure that the organization can take advantages of the benefits provided by the cloud some of the cost management and billing features include conducting administrative tasks such as paying the bill, managing the billing access to costs, downloading the costs and usage data, proactively applying data analysis to cause, setting spending threshold set, identifying opportunities for workload changes and many such others.

A sure cost management and best practice involves a virtuous cycle of visibility accountability and optimization in saving costs this cycle can be better understood when we review the features from the actions that can be taken on the billing account when the billing account is created at the time of signing up to Azure it begins to accumulate invoices payments and cost tracking measurements. There can be more than one billing accounts. Some accounts begin with the pay as you go billing model it can account for resource usage is and allow the option for users to terminate resources when a threshold is exceeded. Other accounts fall under enterprise and customer agreements and they are typically signed business to business or in the latter case when the organization signs up for a customer agreement with Microsoft billing differs from cost management altogether while billing is the process of invoicing customers for goods or services and managing the commercial relationship cost management is an operational practice it identifies costs and usage patterns that can be provided with advanced analytics and reports based on the negotiated prices and factors in reservations it can provide even discounts the reports on internal and external costs based on usages and marketplace charges can be collectively presented via cost management features these reports help understand the drilldown on spending as well as the breakouts under different categories some predictive analytics are also available which help identify the resources that cost more than others. One such feature is a reservation and as your resource reservation helps save money by committing to a one year or three year plan for multiple products this commitment gets some discount on the resources despite their usage it can significantly reduce resource costs and in some cases up to 72% of paid pay as you go prices when they play discount they don't alter the runtime state of the resources so it's merely a policy the total cost of upfront and monthly reservations is the same and we don't pay any extra fee when we choose to go monthly there are some advantages to buying preservations such as an immediate reservation discount not being charged for resources on a continuous basis and tolerating fluctuations. certain attributes for reservations determine the resource to be purchased choices between SKUs and regions wherever applicable and scope can change the instance being reserved determining what to purchase is one of the key decisions in cost management and any such decision can be applied on an hourly basis well it's easy to buy reservations online via the Azure portal the same can be done via API's PowerShell is decays and command line interfaces the billing for a reservation proceeds from a subscription but the reservation can even be applied two different subscription. Reservation can also be split into two reservations if the assured result virtual machine instance is purchased then a reservation discount can be applied to that resource. at the time of purchase there are two objects created a reservation order and reservation actions such as split merge partial refund or exchange created new reservations are included under the reservation order it can be viewed by selecting the reservations and navigating to the order ID. The reservation scope determines the set of resources to which the reservation applies the billing contest is dependent on the subscription used to buy the reservation if the reservation scope is changed from shared to single then only the owner can select this some of their subscriptions for the reservation scope, but enterprise agreement and Microsoft customer agreement billing contributors can manage hold reservations for their organizations. there are two ways to go about sharing this privilege first access management can be delete-delegated for an individual reservation order by assigning the owner role to the individual at the resource scope of the reservation order the other way is to use a user as a billing administrator to an agreement backed reservation. all users go to the shore portal to manage their costs from the cost management and billing section of the portal. There are some extended features available for self-service exchanges and refunds for Azure reservations, but the reservations must be similar for their users to take advantage of these features exchanges can work both ways from downsizing to upscaling also service features are available from the portal.