Azure Region Pricing: Costs for Compute

In this blog we are going to examine how Microsoft Azure region pricing varies and how region selection can help you reduce cloud spending.

How Organizations Select Public Cloud Regions

There are many comparisons that go into pricing differences between AWS vs Azure vs GCP, etc. At the end of the day, however, most organizations select one primary cloud service provider (CSP) for most of their workloads, plus maybe another for multi-cloud redundancy of critical services. Once selected, organizations then typically put many of their workloads in the region closest to their offices, plus maybe some geographic redundancy in their production systems. In other situations, a certain region is selected because that is the first region to support some new CSP feature. As time goes by, other regions become options because either those new features are propagated through the system, or whole new regions are created.

CSP regions tend to cluster around certain larger geographic regions, that I will call “areas” for the purpose of this blog. Looking at Azure in particular, we can see that Azure has three major US areas (Western, Central, and Eastern). The Western and Eastern US areas each have two Azure regions, and the Central area has four Azure regions. The UK, Europe and Australia areas each have two Azure regions. There are a number of other Azure regions as well, but they are far enough dispersed that I would consider them to be areas with a single region.

How Does Azure Region Pricing Vary?

With this regional distribution as a starting point, let’s look next at costs for instances. Here is a somewhat random selection of Azure region pricing data, looking at a variety of instance types (cost data as of approximately March 1, 2018).

While this graphic is a bit busy, there are a couple things that jump out at us:

• Within most of the areas, there are clearly more expensive regions and less expensive regions.
• The least expensive regions, on average across these instance types are us-west-2, us-west-central, and korea-south.
• The most expensive regions are asia-pacific-east, japan-east, and australia-east.
• Windows instances are about 1.5–3 times more expensive than their Linux-based counterparts

Let’s zoom-in on Azure Standard_DS2_v2 instance type, which comprises almost 60% of the total population of Azure instances customers are managing in the ParkMyCloud platform.

We can clearly see the relative volatility in the cost of this instance type across regions. And, while the Windows instance is about 1.5–2 times the cost of the Linux instance, the volatility is fairly closely mirrored across the regions.

Of more interest, however, is how the costs can differ within a given area. From that comparison we can see that there is some real savings to be gained by careful region selection within an area:

Over the course of a year, strategic region selection of a Windows DS2 instance could save up to $578 for the asia-pacific regions, $298 for the us-east regions, and $228 for the Korean regions.

How to Save Using Regions

By comparing regions within your desired “area” as illustrated above, the savings over a quantity of instances can be significant. Good region selection is fundamental to controlling Azure costs, and for costs across the other clouds as well.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on March 14, 2018.