2475 03 Des Cost Estimate Ce8c94fb

Azure Cost Estimate: aks-platform

• 💰 Cost At-a-Glance
• ✅ Decision Summary
• 🔁 Requirements → Cost Mapping
• 📊 Top 5 Cost Drivers
• Architecture Overview
• 🧾 What We Are Not Paying For (Yet)
• ⚠️ Cost Risk Indicators
• 🎯 Quick Decision Matrix
• 💰 Savings Opportunities
• Detailed Cost Breakdown
• References

Generated by architect agent | 2026-02-15

Generated: 2026-02-15 Region: swedencentral Environment: Production MCP Tools Used: azure_price_search, azure_cost_estimate, azure_ri_pricing, azure_discover_skus Architecture Reference: 02-architecture-assessment.md

💰 Cost At-a-Glance

Monthly Total: ~$1,880 | Annual: ~$22,560

Budget: $3,000–5,000/month (soft) | Utilization: 38–63% ($1,880 of $3,000–$5,000)

Status	Indicator
Cost Trend	➡️ Stable (fixed provisioned compute)
Savings Available	💰 ~$2,200/year with 1-year Reserved Instances
Compliance	✅ SOC 2 / GDPR / ISO 27001 aligned (no cost premium)

✅ Decision Summary

• ✅ Approved: AKS Standard tier, WAF v2 ingress, GP 4 vCore SQL (ZR), Premium ACR, NAT Gateway, full observability stack
• ⏳ Deferred: Redis Cache, DDoS Standard, multi-region DR, Azure Front Door, premium monitoring (Sentinel)
• 🔁 Redesign Trigger: If concurrent users exceed 5,000 or p95 latency cannot meet < 200 ms with current SQL vCore count, scale SQL to 8 vCores (+$490/mo) and evaluate Redis Cache (+$55/mo)

Confidence: High | Expected Variance: ±15% (Log Analytics ingestion volume is the main variable; node autoscaling adds $149–745/mo at 3–8 nodes)

🔁 Requirements → Cost Mapping

📊 Top 5 Cost Drivers

💡 Quick Win: Enable ACR image retention policy to auto-delete untagged manifests older than 30 days — keeps storage costs flat as images accumulate.

1️⃣ Azure SQL Database

2️⃣ AKS User Node Pool

3️⃣ Application Gateway WAF v2

Architecture Overview

Cost Distribution

Month-over-Month Projection

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xychart-beta
    title "6-Month Cost Projection ($)"
    x-axis ["Month 1", "Month 2", "Month 3", "Month 4", "Month 5", "Month 6"]
    y-axis "Monthly Cost ($)" 0 --> 3000
    bar [1880, 1880, 1950, 2050, 2150, 2300]

Growth driven by: Log Analytics ingestion scaling with workload count, SQL storage auto-grow, and user node pool autoscaling as traffic increases.

Key Design Decisions Affecting Cost

🧾 What We Are Not Paying For (Yet)

• Azure Cache for Redis (~$55–250/mo): Add if caching patterns emerge from load testing
• Azure DDoS Protection Standard (~$2,944/mo): Current risk accepted with WAF + Basic DDoS
• Multi-region DR (~$1,500+/mo): Single-region with SQL geo-restore; full DR adds second AKS cluster
• Azure Front Door (~$350+/mo): Not needed — App Gateway handles single-region ingress
• Azure Sentinel (~$2.46/GB): Log Analytics sufficient for now; Sentinel adds SIEM/SOAR capabilities
• Azure Bastion (~$140/mo): SSH via az aks command invoke; add Bastion if persistent debug access needed
• Azure Firewall (~$900/mo): NAT Gateway provides egress; add Firewall if egress filtering required

Assumptions & Uncertainty

• Log Analytics ingestion estimated at ~20 GB/mo based on typical AKS clusters with 3–5 user nodes; higher workload density increases log volume
• SQL storage set at 100 GB with auto-grow; growth rate depends on application data patterns
• Application Gateway capacity unit estimate (~$100/mo) based on moderate traffic; high-throughput workloads may increase CU consumption
• Node autoscaling costs ($149–$745/mo range) depend on actual pod scaling behavior

⚠️ Cost Risk Indicators

⚠️ Watch Item: AKS user pool autoscaling is the largest cost variable. At steady state with 3 nodes: $447/mo. At full scale with 8 nodes: $1,190/mo — a $743/mo delta. Set autoscaler carefully and monitor.

🎯 Quick Decision Matrix

"If you need X, expect to pay Y more"

💰 Savings Opportunities

Total Potential Savings: ~$5,120/year (1-yr RI on VMs + SQL)

Strategy	Commitment	Monthly Savings	Annual Savings	% Reduction
VM Reserved Instances (1-yr)	1-year	$183.54	$2,202.48	~31%
VM Reserved Instances (3-yr)	3-year	$281.39	$3,376.68	~47%
VM Savings Plan (1-yr)	1-year	$148.82	$1,785.84	~25%
SQL Reserved Capacity (1-yr)	1-year	$200.46	$2,405.52	~41%
Spot instances (dev/test pool)	N/A	~$250.00	~$3,000.00	~60%¹
Dev/Test pricing (non-prod sub)	N/A	~$140.00	~$1,680.00	~24%²

¹ Savings on dev/test node pool only (if using spot nodes instead of on-demand) ² Savings on dev subscription VM licensing (Linux only — already no Windows cost)

RI Pricing Detail (from Azure Pricing MCP)

Recommended: 1-year RIs for baseline AKS nodes (2× D2s_v5 system + 3× D4s_v5 user) — total annual savings of ~$2,200 with a 7.1-month break-even.

Detailed Cost Breakdown

Assumptions

• Hours: 730 hours/month (24/7 production workload)
• Network egress: < 100 GB/mo (moderate API traffic via NAT Gateway)
• Storage growth: ~5 GB/month SQL, container images < 50 GB total
• Log ingestion: ~20 GB/mo across AKS + resource diagnostics

Line Items

Notes

• AKS node VMs eligible for 1-year or 3-year Reserved Instances (41–63% savings)
• SQL Database compute eligible for reserved capacity (similar RI discounts)
• ACR classified under Networking as it provides container image distribution — could alternatively be classified under Compute
• Log Analytics first 5 GB/mo is free; Container Insights generates the majority of ingestion volume
• Private Endpoints and Private DNS Zones have no additional cost beyond the resources they connect to
• Consider Dev/Test subscription pricing for non-production environments

References