Book Image

The Road to Azure Cost Governance

By : Paola E. Annis, Giuliano Caglio
Book Image

The Road to Azure Cost Governance

By: Paola E. Annis, Giuliano Caglio

Overview of this book

Cloud teams and ICT cost controllers working with Azure will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide, introducing a process model for structured cost governance. The Road to Azure Cost Governance is a must-read if you find yourself facing the harsh reality of monthly cloud costs gradually getting out of control. Starting with how resources are created and managed, everything you need to know in order to track, display, optimize, rightsize, and clean up cloud resources will be tackled with a workflow approach that will leave the choice of operation to you (be it the Azure CLI, automation, logic apps, or even custom code). Using real-world datasets, you'll learn everything from basic cost management to modeling your cloud spend across your technical resources in a sustainable way. The book will also show you how to create a recursive optimization process that will give you full control of spending and savings, while helping you reserve budget for future cloud projects and innovation. By the end of this Azure book, you'll have a clear understanding and control of your cloud spend along with knowledge of a number of cost-saving techniques used by companies around the world, application optimization patterns, and the carbon impact of your cloud infrastructure.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1: Cloud Cost Management
5
Section 2: Cloud Cost Savings
9
Section 3: Cost- and Carbon-Aware Cloud Architectures

Reviewing the subscription hierarchy and management groups

We learned in the previous sections how to split and associate costs according to your organization's needs. In this section, we will learn how to define a subscription hierarchy that matches as much as possible your company's finance operations, and we'll also introduce technical concepts that are relevant to the cloud optimization process, such as management groups.

As a rule of thumb, I have seen customers make the following choices over time, each of them changing and reverting to the other where possible, mostly due to the limits in charging each service:

  • Keep all resources in the same subscription: It seems logical in the concept of a single virtual data center to keep billing all in one large bucket. Please keep in mind, though, that using one single subscription for all your resources has several limitations: in terms of technical resources being limited, and in terms of chargeback operations...