VM pricing models in Azure - Mini Project: Build & Apply

VM Pricing Models in Azure

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud assistant helping a small company understand different Azure Virtual Machine (VM) pricing models. The company wants to compare pay-as-you-go and reserved instance pricing for specific VM types.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple data structure to hold VM pricing information, add a configuration for the pricing model, calculate the monthly cost based on the model, and finalize the configuration for deployment.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with VM types and their pay-as-you-go hourly prices

Add a variable to select the pricing model ('payg' or 'reserved')

Calculate the monthly cost for each VM type based on 730 hours per month

Add a final configuration key to indicate the pricing model used

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud architects and cost analysts often compare VM pricing models to optimize cloud spending.

💼 Career

Understanding VM pricing helps in budgeting, cost optimization, and advising clients or teams on cloud infrastructure choices.

1

Create VM pricing dictionary

Create a dictionary called vm_prices with these exact entries: 'Standard_B1s': 0.012, 'Standard_D2s_v3': 0.096, 'Standard_F4s': 0.169. These represent the pay-as-you-go hourly prices in USD.

Azure

# Create the vm_prices dictionary with exact VM types and prices
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with the exact keys and values.

2

Add pricing model configuration

Add a variable called pricing_model and set it to the string 'payg' to represent the pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Azure

vm_prices = {
    'Standard_B1s': 0.012,
    'Standard_D2s_v3': 0.096,
    'Standard_F4s': 0.169
}
# Set the pricing_model variable to 'payg'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'payg' to the variable pricing_model.

3

Calculate monthly VM costs

Create a new dictionary called monthly_costs that calculates the monthly cost for each VM type by multiplying the hourly price from vm_prices by 730 hours. Use a dictionary comprehension with vm and price as variables.

Azure

vm_prices = {
    'Standard_B1s': 0.012,
    'Standard_D2s_v3': 0.096,
    'Standard_F4s': 0.169
}
pricing_model = 'payg'
# Create monthly_costs dictionary using a comprehension
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary comprehension with for vm, price in vm_prices.items() and multiply price by 730.

4

Add final pricing model key

Add a new key 'pricing_model' to the monthly_costs dictionary and set its value to the pricing_model variable.

Azure

vm_prices = {
    'Standard_B1s': 0.012,
    'Standard_D2s_v3': 0.096,
    'Standard_F4s': 0.169
}
pricing_model = 'payg'
monthly_costs = {vm: price * 730 for vm, price in vm_prices.items()}
# Add 'pricing_model' key to monthly_costs with value pricing_model
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the pricing_model variable to the 'pricing_model' key in monthly_costs.