Bringing Visibility and Allocating Cost

With so many things to look at, often, the FinOps team does not know where to start, what to look for, and how to establish a successful FinOps practice for the organization. In this chapter, we will start by bringing visibility to your existing IT environment using two powerful tools. First is the Microsoft Well-Architected Framework (WAF) Cost Optimization assessment questionnaire. This will help you understand the people side of things and what practices engineers, DevOps, product owners, and solution architects follow to build and deploy their workloads in Azure. At the end of the self-assessment, you will be provided with a baseline score. This score is your starting point to keep track of your improvements over a quarter or year. As you make small adjustments, this score will improve over time. The second tool we will explore is Microsoft’s Cost Management + Billing to show your current cloud costs and the drivers behind them.

Once you have this visibility, we will move on to understanding cost allocation. We will use accounts, management groups, subscriptions, and tags to allocate the cost proposed by the finance team.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Tools used in this book for implementing FinOps for Microsoft Azure
• What is the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework?
• Creating a baseline using WAF – the Cost Optimization assessment
• Cost allocation from an accounting point of view
• Cost allocation in Azure for FinOps
• Exploring cost analysis in the Azure portal

Let’s get started!