We are going to learn about 5 basic tips that can come handy to you when you are creating and working with Azure Virtual Machines. These tips are the kind that were already in front of your eyes or maybe even known to you, but still you never used them.

• To learn about those, let us go ahead and create a new VM.

Tip 1: The first thing that can help us to save money is Azure Spot Instance.

Azure Spot Instance can help you save up to 90% of the normal VM price. You pay up to the maximum price that you optionally agree to in advance. The thing is that your VM might be stopped when other users need the underlying Azure Resources. However, this works well only when your workloads are the kind that can be interrupted.

Tip 2: Money can also be saved when you use Azure Hybrid Benefit, if you bring your own license for Windows Server or SQL Server. This can save up to 49% of your cost. I do not have my own license so I will just move ahead with this.

Tip 3: We can also save money by configuring Auto Shutdown. These are the options that we usually skip or don’t look at when we want to create VMs for a short period of time. You can find the option in the Management tab. This option automatically shuts down the VM at a certain time. This means that the VM doesn’t run for 24 hours and stops at a certain time of the day.

Tip 4: Deallocate VM resources

When you shut down the VM, it doesn’t actually shut the VM down. The VM resources are still running and costing you.

But when you stop the VM like this, you deallocate its resources and only pay for the minimum cost of the VM.

Tip 5: Resize VMs

You should take care of picking the right size for your VM. There are many sizes and types to choose from and of course, each one has a different price. Youshould assess your VM usage regularly and scale the size of your VM to what you need. According to your requirement, you may need a low configuration VM but you might be using one with a high configuration.

That is it for this post.