Ryan Adams built a process to save money on storage costs for a customer’s test environment:
One of the best things about Azure, and the cloud in general, is we can automate most anything, and we are going to look at how to automate Azure VM Storage. This allows us to come up with some outside-of-the-box solutions. I had a customer with a road block that we were able to work around by automating some things with their Azure Virtual Machines.
Their challenge was that they wanted to move their test and development environments to Azure, but the storage cost was prohibitive. They needed premium storage to mimic their production environment, but it was not financially viable for test and development so they were going to keep it all on premises. During our conversations I learned that they only test between 8am and 5pm, Monday through Friday. My suggestion was that we put their databases on cheaper storage during off times and only premium when they are actively using it.
This doesn’t look like a one-hour task but if you’re in need of some cost savings on storage in non-production environments, check out Ryan’s scripts.