Best Practices for Cloud Resources (Azure)

 Best Practices for Cloud Resources (Azure)

General best practices 

• Resource costs differ across regions. Try using a region with lower costs. 
• Enterprise Agreements provide the best discounts. If you are not in an Enterprise Agreement, try to use one for the cost benefits. 
• If Azure costs can be prepaid, then discounts for all kinds of subscription can be gained. 
• Delete or remove unused resources. Figure out what resources are underutilized and reduce their SKU or size. If they are not needed, then delete them. 
• Use Azure Advisor and take its recommendations seriously.

 Cloud Compute Best Practices

• Choose the best location for your compute services, such as virtual machines.Choose a location where all Azure features and resources are available together in the same region. This will avoid egress traffic. 
• Choose the optimal size for your virtual machines. A bigger virtual machine costs more than a smaller one, and a bigger virtual machine might not be required at all.
• Resize virtual machines according to demand. Azure releases new virtual machine sizes frequently. If a new size becomes available that is better suited to your needs, then it should be used.
•  Shut down compute services when they are not needed. This particularly applies to non-production environments. 
• Deallocate virtual machines rather than shutting them down. This will release all resources and consumption will stop. 
• Use development/testing labs for development and testing purposes. They provide policies and auto-shutdown and auto-start features.
•  With virtual machine scale sets, provision few virtual machines and increase their count based on demand. 
• Choose the correct size (whether small, medium, or large) for application gateways. They are backed up by virtual machines and can help reduce costs if sized optimally. Also, choose the basic tier application gateway if a web application firewall is not needed. 
• Choose the correct tiers for virtual private network gateways (including a basic virtual private network, standard, high performance, and ultra performance). 
• Minimize network traffic between Azure regions by collocating resources in the same region. 
• Use a load balancer with a public IP to access multiple virtual machines rather than assigning a public IP to each virtual machine. 
• Monitor virtual machines and their performance and usage metrics. Based on those metrics, determine whether you want to upscale or scale out the virtual machine. Consultation of the metrics could also result in downsizing the virtual machines.

Cloud Storage Best Practices 

• Choose the appropriate storage redundancy type (whether GRS, LRS, or RA-GRS). GRS is costlier than LRS, for instance. 
• Archive storage data to cool or archive the access tier. Keep data that is frequently accessed in the hot tier. 
• Remove blobs that are not required. 
• Delete virtual machine operating system disks explicitly after deleting the virtual machine, if they are not needed.
• Storage accounts are metered based on their size, write, read, list, and container operations. 
• Prefer standard disks over premium disks. Use premium disks only if business requirements demand it. 
•  Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and caching for static files instead of fetching them from storage every time.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) best practices 

• Choose the appropriate Azure SQL tier (whether basic, standard, premium RS, or premium) and appropriate performance levels in terms of DTUs. 
• Choose appropriately between single databases and elastic databases. If there are a lot of databases, it is more cost-efficient to use elastic databases compared to single databases. 
• Ensure Azure SQL security – encrypt data at rest and in motion, data masking, threat protection are enabled.
• Ensure that backup strategy and data replication is set up according to business demands. 
• Ensure there is redundancy for web apps with multi-region availability using traffic manager.
• Use Redis cache and CDN for faster delivery of data and pages.
• Re-architect your solutions to use PaaS solutions (such as serverless solutions and microservices in containers) rather than Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions. These PaaS solutions remove maintenance costs and are available on the consumption-per-minute basis. If you do not consume these services, there is no cost, even though your code and services will still be available round the clock.