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

Reservation utilization

As you might have figured out from the reservations' workflow, the hard work begins after purchasing them and finding out if the money has been well spent. You have committed to buying a cloud service for 1 or 3 years and in exchange, you are getting a very high discount.

But what if your internal customers forget about the reservations and start spinning up other services without correctly using those you reserved? The following steps will help us avoid this complete waste of money and resources:

  1. First, you need to be able to see the cost of unused reservations. This can be done through the Azure Cost Management portal by going to the Cost analysis page (and even in Power BI App), switching to the AMORTIZED COST view, and setting Meter category to virtual machines and Group by to Charge type.

    As we learned in Chapter 2, What Does Your Cloud Spending Look Like?, the billing updates may take up to 48 hours to show up; hence, a good monthly report...