Azure Billings Options

[psynegy]

We're trying to get our head around what the options are for billing in Azure for schools.

 

I've seen mentions of PAYG, Open Licence, and someone mentioned Education Agreement?

 

I can only imagine the response I'd get if I said we needed the school credit card on file for a potentially unlimited spend... Does that limit us to using credits on the Open Licence?

 

Would love to hear how other schools manage their Azure billing.

 

Thanks!

[IT_JB]

If you have a CSP attached to your tenant you can ask to be billed via them. They will then invoice you monthly.

[psynegy]

If you have a CSP attached to your tenant you can ask to be billed via them. They will then invoice you monthly.

Might as well be on the credit card at that point...?

 

I think management will be reluctant to let us have free reign over being able to just hit "purchase" on something that could accidentally cost tens of thousands.

[snagrat]

We get billed via CSP. Stone bill us and it works out a little cheaper than PAYG

[IT_JB]

Might as well be on the credit card at that point...?

 

I think management will be reluctant to let us have free reign over being able to just hit "purchase" on something that could accidentally cost tens of thousands.

 

Depends on what you're using on Azure. Some things will depend on usage but most services that a school would use are fixed costs per month. You can set strict controls over what accounts are allowed to set up new services that would incur costs, so it's more about setting your internal approval process for additional Azure spending.

[psynegy]

Do you find your bills are consistent? How do you agree provisioning new services with your finance department?

 

We currently operate very much on a "you need something, you put in an order form, we order it" system at the moment.

 

Do we need to look at finding a more flexible (read: trusting) arrangement?

[IT_JB]

Do you find your bills are consistent? How do you agree provisioning new services with your finance department?

 

We currently operate very much on a "you need something, you put in an order form, we order it" system at the moment.

 

Do we need to look at finding a more flexible (read: trusting) arrangement?

 

Very consistent, got about 2 years worth of billing through azure now for a 100% cloud-based MAT. Happy to go through some of our billing with you if seeing a real example would help at all. Just drop me a pm.

 

For us, I have an amount I can approve myself. For larger spending, I would write out an order form for the additional cost per month and send it to finance for approval.

[Steve21]

Do you find your bills are consistent? How do you agree provisioning new services with your finance department?

 

We currently operate very much on a "you need something, you put in an order form, we order it" system at the moment.

 

Do we need to look at finding a more flexible (read: trusting) arrangement?

 

If it’s things like azure VMs you can prepay for 1/3 years with them, so the main cost will stay the same

 

Obviously if you have lots of paid for api etc that’ll change but the base cost shouldn’t increase unless you change spec/storage etc

 

Steve

[localzuk]

We have a credit card on our account, but we don't PAYG. We top up our Open subscription periodically when we're running out of credit. Ensures we don't suddenly get any crazy charges.

[psynegy]

Very consistent, got about 2 years worth of billing through azure now for a 100% cloud-based MAT. Happy to go through some of our billing with you if seeing a real example would help at all. Just drop me a pm.

We might very well take you up on that offer! Thanks

 

We have a credit card on our account, but we don't PAYG. We top up our Open subscription periodically when we're running out of credit. Ensures we don't suddenly get any crazy charges.

Do you top this up with the credit card, or through a 3rd party supplier? Our vendor has told us today: "It is no longer possible to purchase prepaid credit."

 

Very confusing!

[localzuk]

Do you top this up with the credit card, or through a 3rd party supplier? Our vendor has told us today: "It is no longer possible to purchase prepaid credit."

Via credit card. Can't buy topups via resellers any more. Basically, I go into the subscription in Azure, and there's an option to top up in there. It uses the card on file.

[Mr.Ben]

We use an enterprise agreement and the OCRE framework.

 

OCRE is only available from Pheonix technologies and offers some discounts.

 

You can buy everything through an EA agreement, including reservations, which when combined with bring your own licence reduce costs further.

 

https://www.phoenixs.co.uk/ocre-cloud-framework-for-microsoft-azure/

 

Happy to show your round the EA portal (although our setup is basic). You can set budgets and create departments to control spending, as well as giving finance access to see the costs.

 

The framework lasts for 5 years (there are 4 left) and you have to buy a minimum amount of credit (one credit at approx £65 per month for the remaining term). Then you top up as needed.

 

Our bills are fairly predictable now so we buy a year up front (for our MAT that's about £18k so significant, but as we are serverless it's easy justify - we would be replacing at least 8 servers per year, plus power costs etc).

[Giblets2]

*Gulp* can you give me some idea of how many primaries and secondaries are in your MAT for that bill? One primary I work for is hinting that they'd like to go serverless instead of buying a new server... Thanks!

[Mr.Ben]

Sorry @giblets - I missed this.

 

Quick answer - the £18k bill is across 40 primaries - about £450 per site per annum.

 

That covers around 20 virtual servers, storage, backups and some resilience.

 

We use reservations to keep the bills down (this is really important).

 

Compared to the cost of a physical, on site server at each site (plus maintenance, power and resilience costs) this is significantly lower for schools.

 

They still look at the total a challenge it though! (Rightly).