My organization is currently using Azure to host some of our legacy .NET (.NET 4.8) applications which use SQL Server database at the back end. These applications are hosted on 9 Azure VMs with a load balancer in front.
Every CI we go through our load testing, UAT etc. for which we have the replica of all of the servers (in order to mimic the real world environment). Because we require the data we cannot decommission these VMs so now we have around 18 VMs (9 each for load testing and for UAT).
I know these VMs can be stopped but the storage will always be there.
I want to request experts to weigh in on if there is a way to optimize the cost for the lower environments may be we can have common disks perhaps for both LT and UAT in Azure. Is that possible?
What other measures can be taken to minimize the testing costs on UAT while keeping the environments almost identical to the production environment.