Containing costs with Azure during the coronavirus crisis

Worldwide, a huge proportion of the population remains under lockdown and closure orders in response to the coronavirus pandemic, affecting broad swaths of the economy. As this recession deepens, containing costs will be a key objective for IT departments in organizations of all sizes.

In our continuing coverage of the wide-ranging impacts that Covid-19 is having in the tech sector—and among technology users—MSDW reached out to Azure-focused professionals to get their perspectives on steps they are recommending to clients to reduce costs in the cloud.

Optimizing and avoiding misallocation

Inefficient use of resources often underlies issues with overspending in the cloud. But revising provisioning, optimizing usage, and taking a more strategic approach to managing resources can help to rein in costs. Steve Hunter, senior director of hybrid cloud at Avanade, explained that during the crisis and the switch to remote work, many organizations are upping their Azure usage. He also encourages teams to start with Azure Advisor, a free tool aimed at reducing risks and cost optimization. He told MSDW:

To receive the maximum benefit from the cloud it’s necessary to move up to stack from basic Infrastructure-as-a-Service models to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options. By replacing servers and software with Azure PaaS you inherit the cloud-native characteristics designed to take advantage of cloud economics. Auto-scale, availability, resilience, security, and evergreen innovation are native to PaaS options. These are elements customers must build and manage on their own when building services using IaaS + software. This not only limits the level of in-built cost savings from cloud economics, it also requires additional operational support in the form of monitoring, security, and version updates. For example, replace database servers with Azure SQL DB, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL or a variety of other managed database platforms. [Manage] web server load using Azure Content Delivery Network capability, or Azure Kubernetes Service to simplify the deployment, management, operations of Kubernetes. Another option to help simplify the environment and manage costs is the use of containerization.