Book Image

FinOps Handbook for Microsoft Azure

By : Maulik Soni
Book Image

FinOps Handbook for Microsoft Azure

By: Maulik Soni

Overview of this book

To gain a competitive edge in today's unpredictable economic climate, you’ll need to unravel the mystery of saving costs on Microsoft Azure Cloud. This book helps you do just that with proven strategies for building, running, and sustaining repeated cost optimization initiatives across your organization. You’ll learn how to collaborate with finance, procurement, product, and engineering teams to optimize your cloud spend and achieve cost savings that can make a significant impact on your bottom line. The book begins by showing you how to effectively monitor and manage your cloud usage, identify cost-saving opportunities, and implement changes that’ll reduce your overall spend. Whether you're a small start-up or a large enterprise, this book will equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to achieve cost savings and maintain a lean cloud infrastructure. As you advance, you'll find out how to benchmark your current cloud spend and establish a budget for cloud usage. Throughout the chapters, you’ll learn how to negotiate with your cloud provider to optimize your rate, allocate cost for the container, and gain a solid understanding of metric-driven cost optimization. By the end of this FinOps book, you’ll have become proficient in Azure Cloud financial management with the help of real-world examples, use cases, and scenarios.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Inform
6
Part 2: Optimize
11
Part 3: Operate

Forecasting based on past usage

Cloud spend forecasting based on past usage is achieved by querying the usage data and using some form of forecasting algorithm to predict future spend. In our case, the data source will be SQL Server in which we ingested the past 12 months of usage data. For more details, please see the Getting your Azure usage data section. We will continue to use Power BI to query the data and create forecasts:

  1. Open the Microsoft Power BI Desktop tool.
  2. Under the Home tab in the top toolbar, select SQL. Then, select SQL Server and connect to your SQL server database where we have imported past usage data. Be sure to select Data Connectivity mode as DirectQuery:
Figure 3.7 – Connecting to SQL Server

Figure 3.7 – Connecting to SQL Server

  1. Next, select the Usage details table and click on Load:
Figure 3.8 – The Usage details table

Figure 3.8 – The Usage details table

  1. Go to Report view in Power BI and insert Line Chart from the Visualizations...