[Closed] Azure VMs

Not an expert but know the basics from being on a bunch of call with infrastructure teams.
Prices vary massively depending on what type of server you get.
Storage is separate from the VM itself. So you can drop the VM and save the costs there whilst keeping the drive intact.
If you sign up for dev essentials you get some not bad deals from MS. Might well cover you for the course.
200 quid initial credits and then a decent numbers of hours of virtual machine for a year.

Free test access gets you enough for a couple of basic spec vms, provided you don't leave them on all hours. Powering down no different from swithcing off a regular box, except you'll get a transient public ip - not really the end of the world as there's also public DNS. IF you get MSDN or other similar learning credits, then you've got enough to run a few reasonably specced machines (i.e enough to lab up most things) - take advantage of burst VMs if you don't need much I/O and use the scheduled powerdown/up to save a few quid.

AWS also do similar things with first month freebies if you want to go down that route.

anyone with some experience of Azure pricing.

It's really, really, really hard to peg.

Sometimes it's sadly a case of "how much could this possibly cost worst case?" then add a bit more, and a little more again.

AWS is slightly easier to price, but not much.

The only thing you'll get charged for when your VM is deallocated is storage. You can schedule your VMs to power down at a certain time every night, just in case you forget to power them down.

Don't just shutdown from inside the VM, you need to power them down from the portal or you'll still get charged.

I presume you're wanting to RDP on to the machine so enable just in time VM access to manage firewall exceptions.

It’s really, really, really hard to peg.

He's running a VM not an auto scaling AKS cluster that the developers have somehow got access to.

on the other hand, don't accidentally spin up a 64 core enterprise SQL server in the non test/dev sub

i have had a play and got a dual core 7 gig setup running (standard d2) and the speed seems fine for the useage case. Mind you i noticed i have a 127gig ssd, i certainly don't need that much space so will see if i can change that.

i guess i have a month of free access to play with and get a feel is this is viable, and note down how much it is costing.

Thanks for the comments.

I've used AWS Window VM machines, cost about £35/month to rent IIRC.

It only exists for as long as you pay for it and once you stop paying they just blow it away. They have a nice desktop sync app for up / down loading files / applications to it.

The Azure pricing calculator is pretty decent for 1 or 2 VMs as long as you know the spec you want + roughly how long you'll keep it powered on for. I'd certainly ditch the SSD unless you need good I/O performance for your app. Azure itself is very easy to use and the free MS training (Fundamentals at least) for it is worth doing (although possibly a bit overkill if you're only ever going to spin up and use a single VM).

all of the above, get yourself the 200quid credit and have a play.
the cost reporting in the portal isnt that bad now (it use to suck) so you can track what you are spending

I get £60-70 a month or so credit on my company account (one man Ltd company, qualifies for Action Pack for £350 a year, loads of MS software including Azure stuff).

I fire up VMs on and off during the month, usually at least one is a Windows VM which costs a bit more due to licence. I never get through more than half my monthly credit.

Check the VM size it defaults to though as it will be a more pricey one. If it's small load you probably want an A or B size VM.

A series are aimed at dev/test type stuff. B series can give you more capacity and CPU but work in a burst mode. They're actually sitting on machines shared with loads of other VMs. A will get you a share of the overall capacity but B will throttle up each when it thinks you're busy using it, i.e. a burst of activity, so you may get a bit more performance when you need it. If it's going to spend most of the time idle then this may be better.

Pick HDD instead of more costly SSD. Also note you get a chunk of temporary storage included as an extra drive on top of the main drive for the VM. You may lose that storage at any time (though usually goes when you deallocate) but if you just want a temporary space without paying more, it's handy.

I find it pretty easy to see the costs in the portal and it projects estimated cost pretty well. Not live update but will update daily.

You can save the state of a VM and don't get compute costs, but will get storage costs unless you deallocate / fully shutdown via the portal.

p.s. MSDN subscription gives you bunch of credits and the Azure pricing is at a discounted dev/test rate. Possibly a trial sub is at the same rates so the free credits might last you a while.

Technically you can keep signing up for trial accounts. Think it's frowned upon but been on courses where they get people to just sign up for trial accounts with random email addresses!

Depending on the app (sounds like a desktop app) a virtual desktop account might be more applicable .. AWS do the same sort of thing too. Not sure if you can buy just one!

If you can handle losing it every now and then AWS spot instance pricing is 20% of full costs, but you can have the rug pulled out by AWS if they need resource ... something like high 90s percentages are closed by owners rather than AWS. Might be a possibility if its very patchy use.