Kurt Shintaku's Blog

A question I’ve gotten numerous times – enough that I’ve noticed – from customers is, “How much does SCCM Cloud Management Gateway cost in Azure consumption?”

If I’m being honest, I realize that this is a necessary question to be answered but it sort of ruffled my feathers because these things are so difficult to estimate given the variables in play:  Number of clients, need for high availability, size of packages to distribute, bandwidth costs, availability of reserved instances, etc.

But at the end of the day, the cost is never a lot.  Usually something like $200-$500/mo in Azure charge for a 10,000+ client configuration.

Well, Configuration Management expert, Johan Arwidmark answered the question for us by exposing all the costs for each variable allowing people to figure out what their estimated costs would be for an implementation in their environment:

A few days ago I asked my fellow tweeps for some real-world numbers of the cost of using the pretty amazing CMG feature for ConfigMgr. The CMG Platform as a Service (PaaS) is using a A2 V2 instance which will determine the minimum cost, but, obviously, the price will vary depending on usage, downloads, and storage costs etc.

Typically the CMG costs around $100 per month per instance, no matter if you’re managing 50 devices or 5000 you will pay that fee. Data is then so cheap ($0.087 at its most expensive) that it doesn’t really add much to the total cost for smaller environments.

Note: CMG does support BranchCache, and if you have remote branch offices where clients are using a CMG, you can reduce the download cost quite a bit by leveraging peer to peer.

TL;DR: Using a CMG is in general not very expensive at all.

The Numbers
Below is what I got so far, but if you can, please share your numbers in the comments below, and I’ll update the post.

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Read more about his analysis here:

• BLOG: Real-world costs for using a Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) with ConfigMgr
  https://deploymentresearch.com/real-world-costs-for-using-a-cloud-management-gateway-cmg-with-configmgr/