QandA: How do you avoid being charged unnecessarily for Windows Azure compute hours?
Note: Cross posted from IUpdateable from Eric Nelson.
You would reasonably expect to be charged for the use of the Windows Azure Platform for any application you have built which is live on Azure.
But you will a) want to minimise that cost and b) you would probably like to avoid it all together while doing development or learning about Azure.
These “tips” should help you minimise the cost:
Make the most of January 2010
You can use the Windows Azure Platform at no charge throughout January and get an insight into the billing. Remember
January is FREE!
Understand how we charge
Billing of compute hours is done in hourly chunks. You get billed for a full hour for every deployed application, even if you only have it running for just 1 minute. Remember that the instance type affects how much we bill e.g. Medium is using 2 physical cores and is twice as expensive as Small which is using one core.
From the Introductory Special:
- Small instance (default): £0.0728 per hour
- Medium instance: £0.1455 per hour
- Large instance: £0.291 per hour
- Extra large instance: £0.5819 per hour
Take advantage of the introductory offers
Including:
- Step by Step sign up for the 25 hour free Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special
- Step by Step sign up for the MSDN Subscriber offer for the Windows Azure Platform
Develop and test locally
Where possible stick with the Development Fabric which comes as part of the SDK. Only deploy an application to Windows Azure when you are absolutely ready to do so.
Delete applications you no longer need from the cloud
When an application isn’t used – DELETE IT – don’t just suspend it. More Detail
Use the right number of instances of an application
Use the minimal number of virtual machines instances. If you don’t have an explicit reason to use multiple instances, don’t. Remember you need two instances to get the SLA from Microsoft.
Avoid Surprises
Track your usage diligently on the Microsoft Online Service portal but remember that the portal is lagging behind your actual usage. I believe it is 12 hours behind.