David Klee offers up some advice:
You might be able to shave off thousands – or more – in your monthly cloud bills for your critical SQL Servers, all while maintaining or even improving performance.
Public cloud providers charge organizations for everything they deploy, and while a few items in the cloud are based on a pay-by-consumption model, most of the services that really stack up, namely SQL Server licensing, are charged on a pay-by-allocation model. If you provision a SQL Server VM with eight cores and promptly forget about it, you will be shocked at the end of the month when you receive your cloud subscription bill. If you provision a 32-core VM, and your workload only uses four cores, you are still paying for all 32 cores, regardless of the low utilization rates. The same goes for memory and storage. A large memory footprint and lots of high-speed attached managed disks all add up.
Read on for some advice around figuring out the right server size for your workload.