Pluralsight course "Estimating One-time and Recurring Costs for Microsoft Azure" - Notes

I found the 1hour 37min Pluralsight course Estimating One-time and Recurring Costs for Microsoft Azure (Released - 10 Dec 2018) useful & jotted down some notes adding some additional points I discovered while digging deeper into some of the areas covered -


Azure Migrate makes it easy to assess on-premises workloads for migration to Azure. This includes the following functionality:

Discovery
- Appliance-based, frictionless, and non-intrusive discovery of virtual machines (VMs)
- Ability to visualize VM dependencies to easily identify multi-tier applications
- Support for vCenter Server 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5

Assessments
- Azure readiness: Is a VM suitable for running in Azure?
- Rightsizing: What's the best Azure VM size based on utilization history?
- Cost estimates: How much would be the recurring cost of running the VM in Azure?

Azure Migrate considers a buffer (comfort factor) during assessment. This buffer is applied on top of machine utilization data for VMs (CPU, memory, disk, and network). The comfort factor accounts for issues such as seasonal usage, short performance history, and likely increases in future usage. For example, 10-core VM with 20% utilization normally results in a 2-core VM. However, with a comfort factor of 2.0x, the result is a 4-core VM instead. Default setting is 1.3x.

Azure App Service Migration Assistant can be utilized to migrate sites from Windows and Linux web servers to Azure App Service

Data Migration Assistant or DMA is Microsoft's tool to simplify the database migration experience, enabling solution architects to identify the correct Azure database SKU and associated cost

Attempting to deploy resources beyond the applied quota will fail, so you can keep track of the usage for your subscription by navigating the Usage and quotas blade in your subscription settings.

As growth and change take place in your Azure environments, keeping an eye on subscription limits and cleaning up obsolete resources will help you to avoid deployment failure and tightly control cost.

The Start/Stop VMs during off-hours solution relies on three Azure services:
- Automation: starts and stops your virtual machines on a schedule
- Log Analytics: visualizes the successful start and stop of your machines
- Monitor: alerts and email notification for VM state changes

Tips:
* Understand existing infrastructure
* Avoid under-estimating
* Research products for dependencies & additional costs - some services may not be available in all regions, may have limitations, cost differences (for example, cost of a VM may vary by up to 62%)

* Cost Optimization levers:
- Hybrid Benefit
- Reserved Instances
- Running Hours

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