An example
In the tiers that Sitecore defined, there is guidance to run the content management server on a B3 tier, which would cost you around EUR 112,05 a month. When the client has requirements on blue/green deployments for the CM and/or has a need for daily backups, the choice for the S3-tier could be made, as it supports out of the box staging slots and daily backups. While it costs EUR 40,- per month more, I am pretty confident that creating your own blue/green deployment strategy and creating your own backup strategy will cost you far more than these EUR 40,- per month. In this case, the choice for a slightly more expensive setup could be made.In this blogpost some design considerations will be described that you could make to choose for a different setup as apposed to Sitecore’s guidance. This might be a choice from a developer’s perspective as well the choice from an infrastructural perspective. Please note that I only included some considerations and all considerations that I have described, all benefit from a costs- and/or performance angle.
Topics:
- App service considerations
- SQL considerations
- Azure Search considerations
- CDN considerations
- Redis considerations
A rough estimation of the costs following the Sitecore recommendations
In the table below there is an rough costs estimation of Sitecore on Azure within the Western Europe region. Costs may differ over regions and may differ based on your agreements with Microsoft. For example: when having an enterprise agreement, you could run you non-production workloads in Dev/Test subscriptions, which greatly reduces costs for several pricing tiers in Azure App Service plans. It gives up to a 55% reduction on SQL and let’s you run a S2 app service workload for about 60% of the costs of a production subscription. In each blogpost I will make a reference on how to possibly reduce costs. The table below shows the estimated costs following the Sitecore recommendations.

The largest difference is in the database area; for the XP workload, there is a major cut on the budget due to the P1 workloads for the xConnect databases, while these databases get omitted by XM workload. It’s a roughly 25% vs a 6% part of the costs, while there still is a large dependency on search services and app services. The good news: costs for all environments can (greatly) be reduced based on smart choices!
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