Microsoft Azure is one of the most widespread cloud solutions, renowned for its intelligent and cost-effective offerings. Amidst giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure has carved its niche, drawing attention thanks to its distinctive approach to optimizing cloud resources and costs.
The popularity of MS Azure is not accidental: the platform can address modern businesses’ requests for efficiency and strategic cloud utilization. MS Azure provides many practical features, empowering users to keep cloud costs in check.
First, users can identify and shut down idle resources using Azure Advisor, aligning expenses with their needs. Additionally, MS Azure provides recommendations to right-size underutilized resources.
For dynamic workloads, Microsoft Azure offers unique plans that allow customers to save up to 65% on compute services by committing to fixed hourly amounts for one or three years. Consistent workloads can benefit from reserved instances, offering discounts of up to 72% over pay-as-you-go pricing for Azure services with one- or three-year prepayment through reservation pricing.
Those who use Windows Server and SQL Server workloads can take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit – it provides substantial savings, making Azure up to five times more cost-effective than Amazon Web Services. The platform also fosters cost-efficiency through autoscaling, dynamically allocating and de-allocating resources based on performance needs.
MS Azure customers can select the right compute service for their applications to enhance cost-effective operations using various hosting options. Additionally, MS Azure emphasizes financial transparency by enabling users to set up budgets, allocate costs to teams and projects, and monitor cloud spending with Microsoft Cost Management.
Microsoft Azure caters to a diverse range of industries. Healthcare organizations enhance patient engagement and operational efficiency; financial services leverage Azure for customer experience transformation, risk management, and trust-building. MS Azure drives business innovation and competitiveness in manufacturing, while retail businesses optimize customer experiences and supply chains. Even governments benefit from Azure for effective and secure citizen services, while the gaming industry utilizes Azure for seamless game development and global scaling.
This article will delve into customer stories and see the most striking examples of how different businesses harnessed Microsoft Azure for optimized cloud cost management.
How Iberia Express saved with Microsoft Azure and its Air Pricing
Background
Iberia Express, a Spanish low-cost airline owned by one of the Iberian market leaders, faced high distribution costs due to its contract with a traditional provider inherited from its “parents.” Despite this helping perfectly synchronize between the companies, it cost too much and didn’t make sense for the type of carrier it is. So, the challenge was to control and eventually reduce these costs while maintaining operational efficiency.
Microsoft Azure solution
Teaming up with Microsoft partner Airplane Solutions, Iberia Express implemented Air Pricing, a software-as-a-service suite available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Leveraging Azure Functions, Azure Storage, and Azure API Management, among other services, the solution achieved remarkable operational speed, returning an average price response in less than 4.2 milliseconds and expanding to 5x capacity in less than three minutes.
Results
Overall, the implementation led to a 75 percent reduction in distribution costs, improved system performance with a bandwidth of more than 20 million daily pricing transactions, and provided a foundation for developing new commercial and marketing offerings. The airline now serves as one of the significant operators out of Madrid Airport, thanks to the e-commerce platform built on MS Azure.
How Perplexity.AI scaled on a shoestring
Background
Perplexity.AI, a startup specializing in AI-based conversational answer engines, sought a cost-effective, scalable, and reliable platform for its product, Perplexity Ask, designed to answer the questions that all businesses face and have intelligent and meaningful conversations about those answers. With a lean team and strict budget constraints, they needed a solution that could support rapid development, scalability, and security – and would do so cost-effectively.
Microsoft Azure solution
Opting for Azure AI Studio and Azure OpenAI Service, Perplexity.AI found an ideal match for their needs. Azure AI Studio helped speed development, offering faster time-to-market, scalability, and security. Complemented by extensive support for large language models like ChatGPT, the platform enabled Perplexity.AI to efficiently create and deploy Perplexity Ask.
Results
In just six months, Perplexity.AI brought Perplexity Ask to market with the help of Azure AI Studio. The platform’s capabilities, combined with ChatGPT 4.0 via Azure OpenAI Service, doubled throughput, reduced latency by 30 percent, and accommodated 7 million monthly users. Azure’s enhanced scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness empowered Perplexity.AI to achieve a competitive edge in the market while maintaining security and trust.
Empowering E.ON Italy’s energy solutions with MS Azure SQL Hyperscale
Background
E.ON, one of the largest European energy companies, aimed to modernize its data estate in 2017. Facing growing data volumes and analytics demands, they migrated to Azure SQL Database, but as data volumes grew, scalability challenges emerged, leading to another modernization effort.
Microsoft Azure solution
E.ON Italy migrated its on-premises data to Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, leveraging up to 100 terabytes of dynamic storage accommodation. This solution provided scalability, flexibility, and analytics support for internal and customer-facing operations. With Azure High Priority support, the migration resulted in nearly 50 percent cost savings per year and a 30 percent increase in native performance.
Results
The move to Azure SQL Hyperscale allowed E.ON to ingest, process, and analyze more data efficiently, providing valuable insights into energy usage. As a result, their proprietary Data Insights Platform (DIP) gained significant space, allowing detailed analyses of larger datasets. The migration also facilitated faster access to reliable data, empowering E.ON to make informed decisions, reduce energy consumption, and improve overall operational impact.
How Fujitsu scaled and optimized their online presence with MS Azure
Background
Fujitsu, a world-renowned information and technology services provider, wanted to enhance its brand trust and support its new business sub-brand, Fujitsu Uvance. The company needed to revamp its online presence, a critical business system managing nearly 300,000 web pages, to align with its brand mission of making the world more sustainable through innovation.
Microsoft Azure solution
In 2021, Fujitsu migrated its global “One Internet Content Management System” to Microsoft Azure, choosing Azure High Priority and FastTrack for a seamless transition. Leveraging Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Azure Cache for Redis, Azure Storage, Azure DevOps, Azure App Service, and Azure Kubernetes Service, Fujitsu improved scalability, flexibility, and efficiency for its online presence.
Results
The migration to Azure brought immediate cost benefits, reducing expenses by half compared to the original on-premises implementation. Fujitsu amassed up to 100 terabytes of data storage, enabling more extended historical data tracking for customers and operational insights. They also leveraged Azure DevOps to enhance agility and provide faster customer updates. Today, Fujitsu continues to use Azure services, driving innovation and improving services for its global clientele.
In conclusion
We’ve explored the successes of Iberia Express, Perplexity.AI, E.ON Italy, and Fujitsu with Microsoft Azure, and it’s clear that Microsoft’s cloud platform offers solid solutions for efficient cloud cost management. But there’s more to the story – third-party solutions like Hystax OptScale are vital in getting extra benefits from cloud optimization and efficient resource management.
As businesses nowadays use multiple clouds, Hystax OptScale stands out by providing extra features beyond what Microsoft Azure offers. The OptScale solution allows you to gain detailed insights and recommendations into your cloud usage for smarter decisions and cost savings, receive instant alerts for unusual cloud activity, navigate through different clouds seamlessly for easy management, and ensure quick and secure data movement between them. Additionally, OptScale’s MLOps capabilities offer critical support for ML/AI teams, providing tools for dataset and model tracking, hyperparameter tuning, running metrics, enhancing performance, and reducing costs.
Hystax OptScale: unified open source platform with FinOps for any cloud workloads, expense tracking, resource and infrastructure optimization, and with MLOps options for ML/AI efficiency and cost reduction → https://github.com/hystax/optscale
