How to estimate the costs of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster?

Introduction

Aside from the variety of technical questions, a very common discussion around Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is … “What will it cost me?”. In today’s post we’ll dissect how the pricing dynamics work and how you can optimize the cost for your cluster(s). Where this might not be rocket science, I do have noticed some organizations struggling with this. So with this I hope to help those out… 😉

Azure Subscriptions : How to buy & migrate them?

Introduction

When looking towards consuming Azure, this first point to start is the “tenant”. This is basically what one would see as their Azure Active Directory, or for some “Office 365”. This is linked to a “Subscription”. The subscription is linked to certain contract type, which influences the billing model. Choosing a certain contact type will (strangely enough) have an impact for you. So today we’ll cover the various options with their (dis)advantages.

 

Contract Overview

Basically, we can distinguish the following contract types ;

• Online
• Enterprise Agreement
• Cloud Solution Provider

In reality, there are a few more, though most Azure offers can be consolidated into the term “Online” I used earlier on. The above are the three most commonly used scenario’s, therefore I will limit the scope of the day to these.