azure
98 articles on azure — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
Azure Event Hubs cost: throughput units vs Premium and Dedicated
Event Hubs Standard bills throughput units by the hour plus per-million ingress events; Premium and Dedicated allocate reserved capacity. Under-provision throughput units and you throttle; over-provision and you overpay. Here is how to size it.
Azure Container Registry cost: a flat daily fee by tier
ACR charges a fixed daily fee by tier (Basic around $5/month, Standard around $20, Premium around $50) that includes storage and throughput, plus overages and data transfer. The tier, not usage, sets most of the bill. Here is how to choose.
Azure Key Vault cost: operations are cheap, HSM keys are not
Standard Key Vault bills about $0.03 per 10,000 operations, so software-protected secrets are nearly free. HSM-protected keys (Premium) and Managed HSM add fixed or per-key costs. Here is where the money actually is.
Azure AI Search cost: you pay for provisioned search units
Azure AI Search (formerly Cognitive Search) bills by tier and search units, provisioned by the hour regardless of query volume. Replicas and partitions multiply the cost. Here is how units price and how to size them for cost and performance.
Data transfer cost across clouds: the line item that varies most
Compute and storage have converged, but data transfer hasn't. Here's the shared structure (ingress free, egress tiered, cross-region charged), where AWS/Azure/GCP diverge, and the universal levers to cut it.
Azure egress bandwidth cost: first 100 GB free, then it adds up
Azure egress is free for the first 100 GB/month, then tiered ~$0.087/GB; ingress is free. Here's the egress map, the patterns that drive the bill, and how a CDN and region co-location cut it.
How to reduce your cloud bill: the checklist that works, in order
Delete waste, right-size, commit the baseline, use Spot, tier storage, cut egress, then keep it down with a cost gate. A practical, impact-ordered checklist with links to the details for each step.
Azure Application Gateway vs Load Balancer cost: L7 vs L4
Load Balancer (L4) is ~$25-40/month; Application Gateway (L7) starts ~$180/month plus capacity units. Here's what the gap buys, when you need L7, and how to avoid defaulting to the pricier option.
AWS vs Azure vs GCP cost: why no cloud is universally cheapest
Comparable compute and storage sit in a narrow band across the three clouds. The real differences are egress, the discounts you'll commit to, and managed services. Here's how to compare apples-to-apples.
Azure Log Analytics cost optimization: ingest less, not just retain less
Log Analytics bills ~$2.30/GB ingested, the bill is driven by volume, not retention. Here's how to cut it with source filtering, Basic Logs, commitment tiers, and Container Insights tuning.
Azure Spot VMs: when 90% off is worth the eviction risk
Azure Spot VMs run up to ~90% below pay-as-you-go, evictable with 30 seconds' notice. Here's the eviction model, what workloads fit, AKS Spot pools, and how to design for interruption.
Azure VNet peering cost: the per-GB charge that bills both ways
VNet peering has no hourly fee but charges ~$0.01/GB each direction (more for global). It bills on both sides. Here's where the cost hides in hub-and-spoke and chatty services, and how to cut it.
Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server cost: tiers, HA, and reservations
Flexible Server bills compute by tier (Burstable ~$12/mo, General Purpose, Memory Optimized) + storage. HA doubles compute. Here's how to pick the tier, when to skip HA, and how reservations and stop/start cut the bill.
Azure SQL Database cost: DTU vs vCore and why vCore unlocks the discounts
DTU bundles compute/storage/IO simply; vCore separates them and unlocks Azure Hybrid Benefit and reserved capacity. Here's which is cheaper for your database and when to switch.
Azure Container Apps vs AKS cost: serverless or a managed cluster?
Container Apps bills per resource-second and scales to zero; AKS bills node VMs 24/7 and gives full Kubernetes. Here's the crossover and when each is the cheaper, simpler choice.
Azure Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans: depth vs flexibility
Azure RIs give up to ~72% off a specific VM size; savings plans give up to ~65% across families with full flexibility. Here's which to pick, how they stack with Hybrid Benefit, and why to commit to baseline.
Azure App Service Plan tiers cost: you pay for the plan, not the app
App Service Plans bill per instance-hour by tier (B1 ~$13, S1 ~$70, P1v3 ~$120+/mo) times instances. Apps share a plan for free. Here's how to pick the tier and why consolidating apps is the big saving.
Azure Front Door vs CDN cost: caching or full app delivery?
Azure CDN is pure caching billed per GB egress with no base fee; Front Door adds load balancing and WAF for a monthly base plus requests. Here's which to use and why cache hit ratio drives the bill.
Azure Functions cost: Consumption vs Premium plan
Consumption bills per execution and scales to zero; Premium bills ~$150/month per always-on instance for no cold starts and VNet. Here's the crossover and the min-instances trap.
Azure Cosmos DB RU cost optimization: stop over-provisioning throughput
Cosmos DB bills by provisioned RU/s (~$0.008 per 100 RU/s-hour) times region count. Over-provisioned throughput and needless multi-region writes are the big overspends. Here's how to right-size and which throughput model to pick.
Azure storage account tiers cost: Hot vs Cool vs Cold vs Archive
Azure Blob tiers trade storage price for access price, and each cold tier adds a retention penalty. Here's the full picture, storage rates, access costs, minimum retention, and redundancy, and how to pick the right tier.
AKS cost optimization: the control plane is free, the nodes are not
The AKS control plane is free (or ~$73/month for the SLA tier), but worker node VMs are the real bill. Here's how to cut AKS cost with the autoscaler, Spot node pools, right-sizing, reservations, and scale-to-zero.
Azure SQL Managed Instance cost: the $1,460/month floor and how to lower it
SQL Managed Instance has a 4-vCore minimum, so even an idle instance starts around $1,460/month on General Purpose. Here's the full pricing breakdown, the Business Critical premium, and the four levers that actually cut the bill.
Azure Hybrid Benefit explained: up to 55% off Windows and SQL
AHUB lets organizations with Windows Server or SQL Server licenses (with Software Assurance) save up to 40% on Windows VMs and 55% on SQL workloads. Stacks with Reserved Instances for 70-80% total savings.