Pricing for your Azure infrastructure can be estimated by using the pricing calculator

 Pricing calculator

Pricing for your Azure infrastructure can be estimated by using the pricing calculator found at http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/calculator/ (Figure 1-13).

The pricing for each service in Azure is different. Many Azure services provide Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers, usually with several price and performance levels in each tier, allowing you to select an appropriate performance level for your use of the service. As you change the selections, the pricing estimate is provided on the right side of the page. You can look at each feature separately or select several resources to estimate multiple features together.

Let’s create a pricing example for two virtual machines and a storage account with 500 GB of data.

1. Click Compute > Virtual Machines. A message appears saying it has been added.

2. Click Data & Storage > Storage. A message appears saying it has been added.

3. Now, scroll to the bottom of the page, and you see it has added Virtual Machines and Storage. It also shows the total for all the resources you’ve specified.

4. On the Virtual Machines tile, set the Region to the one closest to you and set Type to Windows (other options include Linux). Next, set the Pricing Tier to Standard. Then, check the drop-down list on instance size and select a D2 V2. If we set the storage to Premium storage, this will also work for DS2 V2 VMs because the pricing is identical for D2 and DS2 VMs. D2 VMs use Standard storage; DS2 VMs use Premium storage.

 

Next, set the number of virtual machines to 2 (Figure 1-14). This shows an estimated cost for having those two virtual machines.

 

5. On the Storage tile, set the Region. Set Type to Page Blob and Disk, indicating that we are going to use this storage account to store the VHD files for our virtual machines. Set the Pricing Tier to Premium (SSD). Select the P30 disk. If you are deploying VMs, you want to use Premium storage for the best reliability and speed; Premium storage only uses SSDs. This will give an estimated cost for that configuration (Figure 1-15).

Calculating pricing on storage.

6. Now if you look at the total section, it gives a total estimated cost for the two virtual machines and the storage (Figure 1-16).

  

7. If you click Export Estimate, it will export all of the data to an Excel spreadsheet.

 The pricing calculator can be helpful in estimating your Azure costs for new projects you want to add or for an entire infrastructure design.

Note The overall pricing plan page does not include variations by region, but you can find those if you go to the individual service pricing pages at http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/ and select the service in which you’re interested. At that point, you can also select the specific region.