Quick tips: How to do more with less in Azure SQL Managed Instance

[Guest UrosMilanovic]

In times of uncertainty and economic downturn, one of the natural moves of individuals and organizations is cutting down their spending. The main question that arises is how to do more with less. In this article we are going to cover a couple of available options that can help in reducing the costs of your SQL Managed Instance. The list includes, but is not limited to:

 

• Azure Dev/Test pricing
  
• Start/Stop capability
  
• Right sizing resources
  
• Adjusting service tier
  
• Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB)
  
• Reserved instance pricing (RI)
  
• Free license for geo disaster-recovery setup
  

 

Azure Dev/Test pricing

 

Target: non-production environments

 

Azure Dev/Test pricing gives customers access to select Azure services for nonproduction workloads at discounted pricing under the Pay-As-You-Go, Microsoft Customer Agreement, or Enterprise Agreement. This enduring plan reduces the costs of running and managing applications in development and testing environments, across a range of Microsoft products. In Azure SQL Managed Instance, this means that your instance is charged for the compute, storage, and backup storage, but not charged for SQL License, which is ~37% of savings (actual percentage varies per region).

 

How do you sign up for Azure Dev/Test pricing? Here are the options:

• Visual Studio subscribers sign up for Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test.
  
• Organizations with Visual Studio subscriptions and Enterprise Agreements sign up for Enterprise Dev/Test using the Azure Enterprise portal.
  
• Organizations with Visual Studio subscriptions and Microsoft Customer Agreements sign up for Azure Plan for Dev/Test.
  

 

To learn more about this benefit, visit Azure Dev/Test pricing page.

 

Use new start-stop capability

 

Target: production & non-production environments

 

With the new start-stop capability for General Purpose managed instances, you can do cost optimizations of environments that are not running 24/7. No matter if you have a regular or irregular usage patterns, use one of two available commands (manual or scheduled action), and stop your instance when not used. With this, you will save on the compute and license billing, as instances in the stopped state are not charged for vCores and SQL license.

 

To learn more about this capability visit Optimize cost of SQL Managed Instances with new stop-start capability.

 

Right size your resources (vCores, hardware generation)

 

Target: production & non-production environments

 

When was the last time you checked the utilization of your SQL Managed Instance? If it has been a while, and in the meantime, we have released two new hardware generations:

• Premium series,
  
• Memory-optimized premium series.
  

Both generations are powered by a newer generation of processors and give more RAM memory per vCore (7 and 13.6 GB of RAM memory respectively). So, if your application is more memory dependent and you had to run 8vCores standard series instance to have ~40GB of RAM, now with 4vCores memory-optimized premium series instance you can get ~54GB of RAM at lower prices. Or if you were running on 8vCores standard series but it never gets fully utilized, premium series 4vCores instance can potentially match that.

 

To learn more about latest hardware visit Maximize performance and scale with new SQL Managed Instance capabilities.

 

Adjusting the service tier

 

Target: production & non-production environments

 

SQL Managed Instance comes with two different service tiers that represent two different architectures: General Purpose and Business Critical. The main difference between them comes from the storage layer and high availability. In General Purpose service tier remote storage is attached to the compute, and high availability relies on spare virtual machines and service fabric (technology similar to FCI – Failover Cluster Instances in on-premises environments). In Business Critical, instance uses local storage and virtual machines form Always On availability group with service fabric as the availability layer. Business Critical is for most cases more performant, but configurability of TempDB and remote storage file layout can improve the performance of General Purpose service tier as well. So, switching from Business Critical to General Purpose and fine tuning the storage configuration can result in satisfactory performance that fits your workload requirements.

 

To learn more about performance adjustments in General Purpose tier visit:

• Improve your SQL Managed Instance performance with new TempDB configurations,
  
• Configure your TempDB max size in Azure SQL Managed Instance,
  
• Increase data file size to improve HammerDB workload performance on General Purpose Managed Instance.
  

 

Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB)

 

Target: production environments

 

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to exchange your existing licenses for discounted rates on Azure SQL Managed Instance. You can save up to 30 percent or more on SQL Managed Instance by using your Software Assurance-enabled SQL Server licenses on Azure. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you pay only for the underlying Azure infrastructure by using your existing SQL Server license for the SQL Server database engine itself (Base Compute pricing). If you do not use Azure Hybrid Benefit, you pay for both the underlying infrastructure and the SQL Server license (License-Included pricing).

 

To learn more about AHB visit Azure Hybrid Benefit - Azure SQL Database & SQL Managed Instance.

 

Reserved Instance (RI) pricing

 

Target: production environments

 

Validation, testing, setting up the production takes time. But once you are there and you have sized your environment right and projected your growth, you will stick with that configuration for quite some time. In this case, the reserved instance pricing is your way to go. Choose between a 1-year or 3-year reservation and save ~35% or ~55% on compute costs. While RI is available for standard series hardware from the very beginning, support for premium series hardware is on its way.

 

To learn more about RI benefits visit:

• Save costs for resources with reserved capacity - Azure SQL Database & SQL Managed Instance,
  
• Azure Pricing Calculator.
  

 

Free license for geo disaster-recovery setup

 

Target: production environments

 

A lot of industries have strict regulatory requirements about RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) values. To accommodate this requirement, customers lean toward geo disaster-recovery setup through Failover Groups. In SQL Managed Instance case, this means creating new SQL Managed Instance in another geo-paired region. This results in doubling the cost of the environment as all resources are charged in both locations. Starting from November 2022, this is no longer the case as the SQL license for standby secondary instances is not being charged.

 

To learn more about cost savings with Free Geo-DR license visit What is the Failover rights benefit for GeoDr.

 

Summary

 

 

In this article we went through several options for optimizing the cost of Azure SQL Managed Instance. The good thing is that you don't have to choose one. You can apply multiple options at once and maximize your savings. You could notice that couple of options like start-stop and free license for geo disaster-recovery setup have been released recently, and product group will continue its investment into cost optimization scenarios.

 

Call to action:If you have ideas that you would like to share, feel free to leave comments to this blogpost or contact us using Microsoft Forms link.

 

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