Over Provisioned SQL Azure Database

Problem

In this story a customer had moved an on premise application to Azure.  They had brought in a 3rd party vendor who specializes in moving this application from on premise to Azure.

The project had been delivered successfully covering the migration of dev/test and production environments to Azure.

The project had ended and everyone had moved onto other projects.

When the customer begun using Turbo360 about a year after the project was completed they identified some over provisioned resources in their environment.

Analysis

The Turbo360 rightsizing tool identified some SQL databases which had big cost saving opportunities as you can see below.

🚨  Looking at the first one in the list it was evident from the resource group name that this was a non-production database and it was configured as business critical with 16 cores which is a big red flag.

If we look at the details of the resource you can see it is a very expensive database with a business critical service tier and a lot of vCores yet it is hardly used.

Solution

Following the analysis in Turbo360 and the Azure Portal and understanding the context of the database we took the following actions:

1. We changed the database to the General Purpose service tier

2. We used the Turbo360 Automation Scheduler

   1. During daytime hours when people are in the office we set the database as an 8 vCore database

   2. After office hours we dropped the database down to 2 vCores over night and scaled it back up in the morning

The net result was a huge saving, we were paying around $700 for the database per month rather than not far off $5k.