How to get better price of Azure resources for DEV and TEST environments

How often are do you estimate the running cost of DEV, TEST, PRE-PROD, PROD environment?

I assume that at least one time.

How often your customers are complaining that the cost of NON-PROD environment is too high or should be reviewed?

Every sprint or new release I assume.

One of the biggest mistakes done by teams that are working with Microsoft Azure is forgetting about Azure Dev/Test offer. Microsoft is offering high discounts for Azure resources that are used for Development or Testing scenarios.

Case study

For an enterprise application, we use to have the following environment configuration

AppService | S2 Standard Tier
Azure SQL Database | General Purpose, Gen 5, 2 vCore
Azure CosmosDB | 8 RU
Blob Storage | Standard

The normal total cost of DEV environment per month is around $980. Adding the testing one, the total cost is around $1860. Additional to this there is another subscription, where teams have the ability to create temporary resources to test or to some integrations. In total, the cost per month for all environments is around $2200.

At the moment in time when Dev/Test was activated, the cost per environment when from $980 to $590. The playground environments when down at $150. We ended up with a total cost per month of $1370. Of course, the production environment cost remains the same, but the other ones cost much less no.

What does this mean for you?

First of all, you don’t need to pay the full price of an Azure VM. For example, a D2 VM with Windows, that generally cost $152 would cost you in the non-production environment only $85.Don’t imagine that all Azure services are ~50% off, but especially computation and SQL instances have high discounts.

The discounts are exactly where the highest cost is generated by an environment – computation and database.

What are the services that have discounts?

Windows machines - billed as Linux machines
SQL Server machines – billed as Linux machines
Cloud services – billed as Linux machines
Azure SQL database - ~55% discounts
Logic Apps - ~50% discount
App Services/HD Insight– discount is around 40% for non-premium tiers. For premium tiers, there is no discount
BizTalk machine - billed as Linux machines

As you can see, for almost all the computation types we have good discounts, especially for the ones where you cannot do to much cost optimisation.

Can I increase the discount level?

YES, you can. If you do any reservations for 1 or 3 years, the commitment discounts will be applicable on top of the Dev/Test discounts.

Should I be aware of something else?

All services that are part of Dev/Test offer are without an SLA. It means that if the availability goes under the standard availability, you will not receive any credits for it. If you are using Dev/Test in combination with EA, don’t be a surprise if in the VM gallery you will find Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 machines.

How can I activate it?

If you are a Visual Studio subscription, you can visit the following URL and activate it - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0023p/. For EA subscriptions, only the Account Owner can create such a subscription. Don’t forget that in both cases, only accounts that have assigned a Visual Studio subscription can access the Dev/Test subscriptions of an EA.

Notes: For non-EA subscriptions, you can activate this offer only for pay-as-you-go subscriptions.

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