On Premise Data Gateway

In this page we will look at cost considerations for the On Premise Data Gateway which is a core feature for many Azure architectures such as Azure Integration Services and also things like Power BI and Power Platform.

In the case of the on premise data gateway we are mainly talking about Azure Virtual Machines under the hood and you will have a VM which hosts your data gateway.  Most of the costs will relate to the gateway.

Factors that affect cost

• VM size

• VM Running Hours

• Data transfer

Things to Think about

Do you actually need a data gateway?

The requirement which often leads to a data gateway is the need to connect to an on premise system.  Common use cases involve connectivity to:

• On Premise or in network SQL Database

• On Premise or in network SAP

• On Premise web service in particular if it needs NTLM authentication

There are a number of different choices to achieve this requirement and one of them is the data gateway.  By introducing a data gateway you then bring in the need for virtual machines which are used to host the data gateway.  This will create some new costs.

There are alternative approaches which can achieve some of the requirements which can negate the need for the data gateway.  These include:

• Logic App Standard

  • Can connect to SAP with vnet integration

  • Can connect to SQL with vnet integration

• APIM

  • Can connect to HTTP with vnet integration (though NTLM will not be available)

  • Can connect to SQL via graph API

How many gateways will I have?

When implementing a gateway you will probably have multiple environments.  Will you have a single VM/gateway which supports all environments and is shared or will you have one per environment.

The more VM’s you have then the more this will cost.

How will I manage availability for my gateways?

A data gateway can be configured with a single server or you can also configure high availability by adding multiple gateways.  The more servers you have the higher the cost.  The question for each environment is:

• Will you do HA

• Will you use active/active or active/passive

Will I share my gateways with other teams?

A data gateway can be used for multiple different use cases, going beyond Logic Apps there are also cases such as Power Automate and Power BI.

A key question is if you will share a data gateway with these other capabilities.  Some companies will do this to reduce cost but there is also a strong argument for separation as the use case like Power BI may stream large datasets which could affect performance of the Logic App use case.

Common Optimizations

Please refer to the Virtual Machines section for info to help here.

How can Turbo360 help

Please refer to the Virtual Machines section for info to help here.

You will be able to leverage features like:

• Cost Visualization

• Cost Monitoring

• Cost Optimization

  • Rightsizing

  • Reservations

  • Scheduling shutdown/start up and scale up/scale down