5 ways to save costs by running .NET apps on Azure

Digital transformation is accelerating at an incredible rate for consumers and employees alike, and the way we live and work has drastically changed. As a result, digital demand is surging, often past the capacity of existing infrastructure due to online demand for goods, services, and information. Businesses are shifting overnight from a physical first approach, to a digital first model putting strain on legacy web apps—both internal and external.

Leveraging our deep expertise in Windows, Visual Studio, and ASP.NET, we designed App Service and Azure SQL Database as the home in the cloud for .NET applications and the databases that power them. Thus, you can be confident with Azure you are hosting your .NET web apps and data on the most cost-effective cloud.

GigaOm recently conducted an independent analyst study, Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud, which found that Azure is the most cost effective and performant environment to run ASP.NET web workloads. Azure is up to 54 percent less expensive than on-premises and up to 30 percent less expensive than AWS. In addition, Azure is the best destination for your Windows Server, SQL Server, and .NET workloads with unparalleled price-performance across our application and database destinations, both IaaS and PaaS. While there are many ways to save on costs when you choose Azure, here are five ways that can help when migrating your web applications to the cloud.

Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud

Use Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to bring your existing on-premises licenses, such as Windows Server and SQL Server, over to Azure. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can save up to 85 percent compared to standard pay-as-you-go rates and achieve the lowest cost of ownership when you combine Azure Hybrid Benefit, reservations savings, and extended security updates. Azure Hybrid Benefit also applies to SQL on Azure and Azure Dedicated Host. Additionally, it provides 180 days of dual-use rights so you can maintain your on-premises operation while migrating to Azure.

Leverage App Service Reserved Instance pricing

Azure’s App Service Reserved Instance pricing is another great way to save on costs. Azure App Service customers can now save up to 35 percent with a 1-year commitment and up to 55 percent for a 3-year commitment, compared to pay-as-you-go prices.

Take advantage of Azure Dev/Test pricing

With Azure Dev/Test pricing, you can get discounted rates up to 71 percent for your ongoing development and testing needs. Using serverless tools like Azure Logic Apps and Functions, you can also eliminate custom code and third-party, helping you to increase development productivity by up to 50 percent. We have also extended our Dev/Test pricing discounts to Premium v3 as well as Premium v2, making it more affordable (especially for Visual Studio subscribers) to test workloads that require virtual network (VNet) connectivity before deploying.

Lower your operational costs

Azure can manage your .NET web apps and databases, so you don’t have to.

Our end-to-end web hosting platform can free up your team to focus on what matters most. Plan on running your applications with confidence, while letting Azure handle auto-patching for database, OS and runtimes, automated database backup, configurable alerts, and logging. You can easily add custom domains, SSL certificates, single sign-on (SSO), and identity-service integration to your apps.

You can also reduce regulatory and compliance costs by automating or simplifying over 30 percent of monitoring work versus on-premises hosted applications. Azure’s AI-powered SQL optimization enables automatic tuning and adaptive query optimization. With application insights providing you with rich out-of-the-box monitoring for ASP.NET applications, you can analyze how increased traffic and upstream dependencies affect the response times of your .NET web applications. Furthermore, Azure Advisor provides personalized recommendations that can help you improve availability, security, and performance while reducing costs.

Enable autoscaling

With Microsoft Azure, you only use the servers you need when you need them. Azure can help optimize your application and underlying database’s performance to meet the peaks and troughs of demand. Azure surfaces opportunities to save with out-of-the-box monitoring for ASP.NET applications while automatically scaling resources to meet workload demand with SQL serverless and Hyperscale databases. Azure is built to be elastic to help you be as cost-effective as possible. But don’t just take our word for it. 

Get started with free Azure migration tools for .NET web apps

You can start reducing your costs today with Azure, the only end to end web hosting platform designed from the ground up to build and manage .NET web applications. With the Azure App Service Migration Assistant and SQL Database Migration Assistant, it has never been easier to get started migrating your applications to the cloud.

Source: microsoft.com