In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, managing costs effectively is crucial for any project. Welcome to our comprehensive guide, “Understanding and Managing Your Costs in Azure AI Studio”. This article aims to provide you with the knowledge and tools necessary to plan, monitor, and control your project costs in Azure AI Studio, a leading platform for managing AI projects and resources.
What is Cost Analysis?
Cost Analysis in Azure AI Studio is a tool that provides detailed insights into your project’s costs. It allows you to view your Azure AI hub resource costs in graphs and tables for different time intervals, such as by day, current and prior month, and year. You can also view costs against budgets and forecasted costs. Switching to longer views over time can help you identify spending trends.
What is Cost Management Data
Cost Management data in Azure AI Studio includes all usage and purchases, including reservations and third-party offerings for Enterprise Agreement (EA) accounts. Microsoft Customer Agreement accounts and individual subscriptions with pay-as-you-go rates only include usage from Azure and Marketplace services. Support and other costs aren’t included.
Supported Azure Account Types
Cost Management supports most Azure account types. Here are some of the supported Azure offers in Cost Management:
Azure Government Enterprise
Azure Government pay-as-you-go
Enterprise Agreement (EA) Enterprise Dev/Test
Enterprise Agreement (EA) Microsoft Azure Enterprise
Microsoft Customer Agreement Microsoft Azure Plan
Microsoft Customer Agreement Microsoft Azure Plan for Dev/Test
Microsoft Customer Agreement supported by partners Microsoft Azure Plan
Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) MSDN Platforms
Pay-as-you-go
Note: if a subscription changes offers, costs before the offer change date aren’t available.
How to Plan and Manage cost for Azure AI Studio using Pricing Calculator
The Pricing Calculator is a tool that helps you estimate the cost of Azure services before you add them. It allows you to select different Azure products, and input your expected usage, and it provides an estimated cost based on that usage.
Here are the steps to use the Pricing Calculator for Azure AI Services in Azure AI Studio:
Step 1: Access the Pricing Calculator
Visit the Azure website or directly navigate to the Pricing Calculator on the Microsoft Azure website.
Step 2: Select a Product
Begin by choosing a product in the Azure Pricing Calculator. For instance, you might select Azure OpenAI. Once you’ve chosen a product, click “Add to estimate”.
STEP 2: Input Your Planned Usage
Next, input the units you anticipate using. If you’re planning to use Azure OpenAI, you might enter the number of tokens you expect to use for prompts and completions.
The cost of using Azure OpenAI service is calculated per 1,000 tokens. This includes both the tokens in the prompts (input) and the tokens in the completions (output). Therefore, when using the Pricing Calculator, you would enter the number of tokens you expect to use for both prompts and completions to estimate your costs.
The cost per 1,000 tokens for the prompt is $0.0015,
The cost per 1,000 tokens for completion, it’s $0.0020.
The total cost of using Azure OpenAI service is calculated by multiplying the number of tokens by their respective costs. For example, if you use 1000 tokens for both prompts and completions, the monthly cost would be $3.50.
Therefore, the calculation would be as follows:
For prompts: 1000 tokens $0.0015/token = $1.50
For completions: 1000 tokens $0.0020/token = $2.00
STEP 3: Estimate Costs for Multiple Products
The Pricing Calculator allows you to select more than one product if you want to estimate costs for multiple products simultaneously. For example, you might also select Virtual Machines to consider potential costs for computing resources.
For instance, let’s say you’ve added a Virtual Machine to your estimate to see the total cost.
If the cost for the Virtual Machine is $137.24
If the cost for the Azure OpenAI service is $3.50
Then the total cost would be $140.74.
Note: whenever you add new resources for Azure AI Hub, return to the Pricing Calculator. Add these resources to update your cost estimates. This way, you can manage and plan your costs effectively.
How to Plan and Manage Cost for Azure AI Studio using Cost Analysis
Here are the steps to plan and manage costs for Azure AI Studio using Cost Analysis.
Step 1: Access Cost Analysis
First, you need to open Azure AI Studio, a platform to manage all your AI projects and resources.
Once you’re in the studio, navigate to the “All project settings” option.
Here, you’ll find an option called “View cost for resources”. Clicking on this will open the cost analysis page of your project. This page provides a detailed breakdown of the costs associated with your project.
Step 2: View Costs per Service
On the cost analysis page, you’ll see a column labeled “Resource”. This column lists all the services that are being used by your Azure AI Project. When you expand this column, you can see the costs for each service.
This allows you to understand which services are costing you the most and where you might be able to make adjustments to reduce costs.
Step 3: Navigate to Resources
Here, click on the “Cost by resource” option and then select “Resource group”. This will take you to a page where you can see the costs of each resource.
Step 4: Set Scope
When the cost analysis page appears, you need to ensure that the scope is set to your resource group. The scope determines what resources are included in the cost analysis. If the scope is not set to your resource group, you can create a scope for the resource group.
Click on "Resource".
Step 5: Expand Project
Finally, expand your project to see the cost for each service used by your Azure AI Project.
If you want to see the cost for services used by your Azure AI hub resources, click on your AI resource. This will give you a detailed view of the costs associated with each service.
It’s important to regularly monitor your costs to effectively manage your resources and stay within your budget. If you notice that costs are higher than expected, you can make adjustments to your usage or switch to more cost-effective services. Hope this helps! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
Conclusion
Understanding and managing costs in Azure AI Studio is an important aspect of effectively running your AI projects. By utilizing tools like the Azure Pricing Calculator and Cost Analysis, you can estimate your costs, plan your budget, and monitor your spending.
Remember, regular monitoring and adjustments can help you stay within your budget and make the most of your resources.
Happy cost planning and managing!