Azure Trade Offs

One of the most important considerations for cost management and designing solutions that are cost efficient is how you will manage your architecture trade offs.

It is very easy to say that you want all of the gold plated premium features but often this will require you to choose the premium pricing options which will have a higher price tag.

Common Trade Offs

As a general rule if you want a solution to be delivered with a lower operating cost then you need to consider some of these trade offs:

• Security vs Cost

• Reliability and Availability vs Cost

• Network Integration vs Cost

• Performance vs Cost

• Premium Features vs Cost

What I need now vs What I think I might need in the future

This is an interesting area.  

Sometimes you will be building a platform and your target architecture may be all singing and dancing but you may not use it all for a few years.  The question is do you build everything you might ever need today or do you focus on what you need now and consider your architecture to be transitional and assume it will evolve over time driven by requirements.

Some of the common architecture principals people use are “Keep it simple” and “Dont build for the day that never comes”.  I think these are good principals to adopt and build your architecture using a just in time model.

This will give you a good balance of meeting requirements but also minimizing cost.

Also I think its very common that over time things will change in terms of your requirements but also in terms of the services offered by the cloud and how you build something today maybe different to how you would build something in 2 years time.  Keeping your architecture flexible and agile will help you to adopt new services here and take advantage of cost opportunities.

Variable Cost vs Fixed Cost

Deciding if you have a preference for variable cost or fixed cost services is a good thing to do.  Both have their advantages and disadvantages but having some architecture principals to guide your decisions will help you when making trade off decisions when cost is involved.