Server Side Chat: How to reduce Azure costs

Identifying the problem

Breno's team faced an unusual billing issue where two projects incurred identical Azure costs despite having drastically different workloads. One project processed only 200 messages per year, while the other handled 50,000 messages daily. Both were billed the same due to the fixed pricing model of Azure Service Bus' premium tier.

The team explored several Azure messaging services, starting with Azure Service Bus, a high-end messaging broker with extensive features but fixed costs. They also considered Event Hub, designed for IoT applications but relatively expensive.

Eventually, they found that Event Grid best suited their needs due to its pay-per-use pricing model and free monthly message quota. This made it the most cost-effective choice for their asynchronous messaging requirements.

Take a look at the recording of Breno's Server Side Chat below 👇

Implementation steps

The first step was replacing Azure Service Bus with Event Grid. The team migrated their messaging functions and took advantage of Event Grid’s free tier and pay-per-use structure. They then switched from a web app-based microservice to an Azure Function, further reducing expenses by leveraging serverless architecture. Additionally, they used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Azure Bicep to streamline cloud resource deployment and management.

To ensure scalability and maintainability, the team embraced Clean Architecture principles. This approach helped them separate concerns and organize code into modular components, making future updates simpler while reducing technical debt.

Results and savings

The cost optimization efforts led to significant savings. The team achieved a 22% reduction in their overall Azure subscription costs. Regularly reviewing cloud costs and questioning unexpected charges proved essential.

Using Infrastructure as Code enabled efficient deployments and scaling while selecting cloud services based on actual business needs, preventing over-provisioning and unnecessary expenses.

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