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

Leveraging Optimization Strategies

Cost optimization efforts should not be focused on one strategy or feature. Instead, it should be evaluated holistically. Azure provides various ways to save money by removing waste, right-sizing, purchasing reservations, savings plans, and highly discounted Spot VMs.

Let’s first explore highly discounted Spot VMs. They are excess Azure capacity available to you with deep discounts without any commitment. The only caveat is that compute can be taken away within 30 seconds of notice so the workload has to be architected in such a way that can handle the eviction. Before you purchase the Spot VMs, you need to decide on the region and SKU since the prices vary based on those. Azure does provide an excellent view of the past 3 months of Spot VM prices and the rate at which eviction was executed. Use this key information to decide the region and SKU selection.

On the other hand, Spot Priority Mix is the best of both worlds. It’s a mix...