3.2.2. 💡 First Principle: Azure Pricing and TCO Calculators

First Principle: Azure's cost estimation tools provide the necessary foresight for financial planning in the cloud. Their core purpose is to enable organizations to forecast expenses for new deployments and to understand the potential savings of migrating from on-premises, facilitating data-driven business decisions.

What It Is: These are free, web-based tools provided by Microsoft to help you estimate and compare cloud costs.

• Azure Pricing Calculator:
  • Description: An online tool that allows you to estimate the costs for new Azure deployments.
  • Use Case: You can select and configure various Azure services (e.g., VMs, storage, databases) and get an estimated monthly or annual price. This is essential for planning the budget for a new project.
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator:
  • Description: A tool that helps you estimate the cost savings you can realize by migrating your existing on-premises workloads to Azure.
  • Use Case: You input your current on-premises infrastructure details (servers, storage, networking, labor costs), and the TCO calculator provides a detailed report comparing those costs to the estimated costs of running the same workloads on Azure. This helps build a business case for cloud migration.

Scenario: A company is considering migrating its on-premises data center to Azure. The CFO needs a detailed report that compares their current IT spending with the projected costs of running their infrastructure in the cloud to justify the migration.

Reflection Question: Which tool, the Pricing Calculator or the TCO Calculator, would be more appropriate for creating this report for the CFO, and why?

💡 Tip: Use the Pricing Calculator for estimating the cost of new solutions in Azure. Use the TCO Calculator to compare the cost of your existing on-premises environment with Azure.