Azure Pricing: Navigating Microsoft’s Azure Cloud

Grazed from Datamation. Author: David Needle.

Microsoft may have been late to the cloud party, but steady investment and improvements to its Azure cloud have made it a worthy competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yet like most cloud platforms, Azure pricing is filled with potential complexity. Among the many advantages of moving to the cloud for cash-strapped IT departments is saving on continued investment in on-premises infrastructure by off-loading to an off-premise cloud platform. In addition to savings in hardware costs and the real estate required to maintain a datacenter, management and security is handled to a great extent (though not completely) by the cloud provider.

Cloud systems let you pay for what you need and scale up, which is far better than guessing at, for example, how many servers you need to buy and maintain in-house and risk getting more than you need or scrambling to add as demand increases. One reason some industries – like retail – overbuy is to handle demand spikes around the holidays even though that means a fair bit of capacity will go underutilized during other parts of the year…

But cloud systems also require capacity planning. You have to estimate how much you’ll need and while you can also scale back later, it’s easy to forget what you committed to and you end up paying for services you don’t need…

Read more from the source @ http://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/azure-pricing-navigating-microsofts-azure-cloud.html