I recently implemented SSRS on a Azure VM and was very surprised when I realized I would be billed for 100% of the hours in a month if my VM was running. This runs around $200 and is in no way economical for our small reporting service we use for about 5 days month. What are my options for reducing VM hours?
I have already established I can shutdown and deallocated the machine when we are not using it. Ideally though the service would go into some kind of sleep mode and reallocate when the service is pinged.
You have a couple of options to correct address this:
You could use automation, where you run a Powershell script to turn you VM off during off-peak time. Check this out:http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/08/20/azure-automation-capabilities-in-depth-the-azure-automation-powershell-cmdlets/
You can setup alerts now in your account portal (yeah, I just said that!) Check it out here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-billing-set-up-alerts/
I would look at both. You can shut-down a VM from PowerShell (MS just demonstrated that to me in a workshop this week), so I would use this approach if you know that SSRS is only going to run for a specified window.