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

Identifying cost spikes

As we learned in Chapter 1, Understanding Cloud Bills, and Chapter 3, Monitoring Costs, at this stage, you should be familiar with all the tools that allow you to get a full picture of your spending and keep it predictable and under budget. Sometimes, however, there are specific conditions that will create unexpected spikes in your costs and will call for a prompt cleanup action. My recommendation is to check the Azure Cost Management page daily and look at a daily stacked view of your spending. The following screenshot shows the cost management page:

Figure 5.7 – Example of a daily stacked chart on your cost management page

In normal operations, you should be able to identify a nice clean pattern (just as the one pictured in the previous example) and immediately spot any spikes that do not resemble your normal pattern of operations.

Spikes can be caused by many underlying issues:

  • An application that is calling a service...