Moving your apps to a fully managed service can be one of the most effective strategies for organizations looking to modernize their applications—it removes the need to maintain infrastructure and is not as time-consuming or complex as a re-write. Our customers have always known that there is no better service than Azure App Service when it comes to organizing your enterprise .NET applications. Leveraging our deep expertise in Windows, Visual Studio, and ASP.NET, we designed App Service and Azure SQL Database as the home in the cloud for .NET applications and the databases that power them. You can be confident with Azure you are hosting your .NET web apps and data on the most cost-effective cloud. GigaOm recently conducted an independent analyst study with results that support this.
The field test compared the costs and benefits of a traditional ASP.NET application running on-premises, in Azure App Service, and on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Ultimately, it revealed cost advantages for users running on Azure App Service, which you should consider when planning your app migration strategy. According to the test results, Microsoft Azure remains the most cost-effective option by some margin, particularly when the ease of migration is factored in.1
The study found that moving to Microsoft Azure has a measurable TCO advantage over Amazon Web Services.2 Moreover, the Microsoft Azure solution offered potential total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of up to 54% over running on-premises and 35% over running on AWS.3
These findings align directly with our vision and commitment to help you improve developer productivity, simplify your operations, and manage your apps more efficiently. In fact, GigaOm found that the three-year total estimated operating cost for ASP.NET applications running on Microsoft Azure and leveraging Azure Hybrid Benefit [referred to as Microsoft Azure (AHB) in this blog and whitepaper] is lower than running on-premises or on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.4 This is an important consideration as it demonstrates the cost savings impact of operational and app management efficiencies through Azure App Service overall.
Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud (microsoft.com)
The Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server
Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to bring your existing on-premises licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, over to Azure. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can save up to 85 percent compared to standard pay-as-you-go rates and achieve the lowest cost of ownership when you combine Azure Hybrid Benefit, reservations savings, and extended security updates. Azure Hybrid Benefit also applies to SQL on Azure and Azure Dedicated Host. Additionally, it provides 180 days of dual-use rights so you can maintain your on-premises operation while migrating to Azure.
Additional findings from GigaOm’s field study include a closer analysis of estimated cost by environment, where costs for ASP.NET applications running on Microsoft Azure (AHB) are lower than running on-premises or on AWS Elastic Beanstalk—as reflected in the image below.
According to the field test results, estimated costs per month for various environments for ASP.NET applications running on Microsoft Azure (AHB) are lower than running on-premises or on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This includes virtual machines and per 10K sessions.
Furthermore, in environments with tens of thousands of sessions, estimated cost for ASP.NET applications running on Microsoft Azure (AHB) are lower than running on-premises or on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
Fully managed services help provide a cost advantage for your app modernization
We know cost is just one of the many factors to consider when planning your app migration strategy. There are other considerations like operational efficiencies and administrative burden that, according to GigaOm, give Microsoft Azure an edge when calculating a true TCO figure.5
How does offloading all that heavy lifting translate to business impact? Let us say you have a .NET application on a virtual machine, your developers or IT team probably need to take care of the configuration, the auto-patching, and security before they can start innovating. A fully managed service such as Azure App Service handles all of this for you and can help you realize immediate benefits. These include easy access to scaling, automatic patching for operating systems (Windows, Linux), all supported languages and frameworks, and SLA-backed uptime commitment. The greatly reduced administrative burden translates into greater operational efficiency and cost savings.
No matter where you are in your app modernization journey, the field test is worth reading as you consider modernizing your legacy apps. Download the findings to learn how you can free up time and build your apps at lower costs.
Get started with free Azure migration tools
You can start reducing your costs today with Azure, the only end-to-end web hosting platform designed from the ground up to build and manage all popular languages and frameworks including .NET web applications, Java applications, and Node.js. With the Azure App Service Migration Assistant and SQL Database Migration Assistant, it has never been easier to get started migrating your applications to the cloud. For guidance on how to use the migration assistant, check out our Microsoft Learning Path which covers both migration assistants.
Interested in learning what other benefits you can get by running your .NET Apps on Azure? Read this e-book, 5 Benefits of Migrating Your ASP.NET Web Applications to the Cloud, to learn the top five benefits, or watch this on-demand webinar, Migrate Your .NET Web Apps to the Cloud to Save Time and Costs.
If you have any questions or feedback, add a comment or reach me on Twitter @mayunkj
Source: Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud (microsoft.com)
1-5Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and published by GigaOm in April 2022 and is a repeat of a similar study conducted in October 2020. The field test compared the costs and benefits of a traditional ASP.NET application running on-premises, in Azure App Service, and on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The test application deployed was a Parts Unlimited web store, an ASP.NET application using IIS for a web server and Microsoft SQL Server for the backend. Performance was assessed by running home page load, item search, and item purchase tests, which ran for 60 minutes each. The cost of each environment was calculated using the AWS TCO calculator, AWS Pricing Calculator, and Azure Pricing Calculator. The pricing calculation for Azure used reserved capacity pricing for App Service and Azure SQL Database and the US East region for hosting, while the pricing calculation for AWS used reserved instance pricing and the us-east-1 region for hosting. Pricing includes Azure Hybrid Benefit, which allows existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to be applied to Azure virtual machines and Azure SQL Database instances. The total cost is an estimate of running the application for three years. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.
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