Help with pricing

[Anthony Marrian]

We've just upgraded to BackupAssist v10 which has a facility to back up to Azure. Using our Office 365 Faculty subsciption (I am the bursar), I have created an account with Azure and apparently have a Trial subsciption and £125 credit. Having initiated a few small backup jobs from within BackupAssist, I see that they are appearing in containers in the Blob service. So far so good. My hope is that I can move from my current offsite backup provider to Azure but before I can do so, I need to know how much it costs to use Azure and (maybe because of the free trial aspect) I cannot see anywhere which says to me something along the lines of "If you weren't on a free trial, what you have backed up so far will have cost you X". I've seen a quote page but I fail at the first fence not knowing what an "instance" is, nor the difference between LRS and GRS. In addition, it's not clear whether you are paying just for storage or whether you also have to pay for the traffic to get files into the storage container, and out again, if necessary. Please can someone give me some help in calculating charges that might apply to us?

Many thanks - Anthony

[#2]

Hi @Anthony Marrian,

You mgith want to have a look at this tool:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/calculator/

[#3]

Thanks Pieter. That's the tool I referred to in my post. I don't know what an "instance" implies, or the difference between LRS or GRS. Also, I don't know to what extent traffic to and from an Azure container is charged, or whether you just pay for storage space taken up by your data.

[#4]

It can indeed be quite tricky to figure out the exact costs. Also I've found that when you add all the elements that you think you need the charges may not 100% match.

Something as simple as the storage costs:

It is quite difficult to predict the number of transactions. However it does give a bit of an idea how much things cost.

Within the Calculator you could include everything but are you sure you got everything? Also over time you will find that systems are used more and therefore your costs will slowly creep up. I would use the tool more to get a roguh indication of costs. So for example creating a VM is expensive but running Azure Functions is cheap. Therefore if you want to run PowerShell you should consider Functions to reduce the cost. Fully predicting the costs is going to be very difficult.

[#5]

>> Fully predicting the costs is going to be very difficult

That's what I figured which is why I thought I'd just start using it and see how the costs stacked up. But I can't find anywhere that will give me existing costs. I'm assuming this is because of the free trial.

[#6]

I don't think that the Trial gives you any discounts? It simply means that you aren't paying for the services and microsoft gives you credit for free.

[#7]

@Anthony Marrian - there is a billing report dashboard that gives you exact run down of your free credit burn rate.

If it is not too much of hassle - I can help you out and show this to you in a short 15 min skype call. This way you will know exactly how much you are paying for the amount of data you are backing up.

[#8]

That's kind of you, Jasjit, but my computer has neither camera nor microphone. Any videos or instructions you can point me at?

[#9]

See if this helps: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-getting-started

But you should be able to go to the "Billing" blade under portal.azure.com and see the burn out rate their for various Azure resources to understand how you are consuming $$.

PS: If you have a smartphone - Skype works on it and it has a microphone :)