Azure - Open License vs Pay as you go

[mb2k01]

Hi All,

Does anyone know if there is a financial benefit to going one way or the other?

I currently have a Pay as you Go subscription that we're utilising for some very minor uses of Azure, but am wondering if it is worth going for credits under an Open agreement instead?

Does it offer any extra value, or is it really just aimed at potentially being 'easier' to manage in terms of having credits paid for by the upfront bill?

[localzuk]

You get more for your money with Open license. You buy it in blocks of £75 each, but pay a little less than that. I last paid £73.50 each.

[mb2k01]

You get more for your money with Open license. You buy it in blocks of £75 each, but pay a little less than that. I last paid £73.50 each.

 

So it's largely the same as PAYG, other than the mini bit of discount per block transaction?

(i.e. If I was to buy credits via PAY I'd spend 75 and be able to use whatever I wanted out of those credits, and if I went OLA I'd get a couple of quid knocked off?)

 

Cheers

[localzuk]

You don't buy credits with PAYG afaik - you just pay for what you use on a linked credit or debit card. At least, that's how my personal Azure sub works. It also means you're protected from runaway costs.

 

That £1.50 isn't a lot, but it scales a little bit. £20 in every £1000 spent free. 2%. Not to be sniffed at.

[mb2k01]

You don't buy credits with PAYG afaik - you just pay for what you use on a linked credit or debit card. At least, that's how my personal Azure sub works. It also means you're protected from runaway costs.

 

That £1.50 isn't a lot, but it scales a little bit. £20 in every £1000 spent free. 2%. Not to be sniffed at.

 

Thanks for that! (I assumed you might be able to equally purchase credits via PAYG if you wanted, but in reality actually use it how you described)

 

What kind of services do you run in Azure? Currently all I do is DNS management (we used to have various external hosting companies for different domains etc!)

We're looking in to Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery and maybe Azure File Sync. The bit that has me worried, particularly with the latter, is getting a decent feel for what the costs will be - as the calculators MS provide seem to be very granular / prescriptive. I'd love to find out a real world cost if you have some rough stats / specs and their costs?

[localzuk]

We currently host DNS for a bunch of our external domains, host a status web page, and store off-site backups there.

 

We currently have 31TB of data stored in Azure cool blob storage. Costs are predicted to be £78 this month. We use Cloudberry Ultimate to back up to it, and we do a "full" backup every week. Though, this is a block level differential so we have a "full" offsite we can download for disaster recovery. Day to day backups are still onsite. Cloudberry is configured to delete old things after the 30 day "must be stored" minimum limit.

[Bob_the_Goon]

Hi @localzuk Do you still backup with Veeam onto a NAS device? From here do you use Cloudberry Ultimate to backup the NAS to the Azure Cool Blob storage? If so, how does the NAS present itself to Cloudberry? Is it presented as an SMB share from which Cloudberry uploads to the cloud?

[localzuk]

Hi @localzuk Do you still backup with Veeam onto a NAS device? From here do you use Cloudberry Ultimate to backup the NAS to the Azure Cool Blob storage? If so, how does the NAS present itself to Cloudberry? Is it presented as an SMB share from which Cloudberry uploads to the cloud?

We use Veeam to back up to NAS, then Cloudberry to back up that to Azure. The NAS presents as an SMB share, yes.

[Bob_the_Goon]

We use Veeam to back up to NAS, then Cloudberry to back up that to Azure. The NAS presents as an SMB share, yes.

That's really interesting. So if you need to restore from a backup on Azure would you need to use Cloudberry to restore it to the NAS and then use Veeam to restore from there? Does Veeam keep those particular backup files in its catalog or do you need to perform some kind of recataloging before you perform the restore?