Optimizing Azure Costs

• Strategies allow customers to minimize Azure spending while meeting solution requirements.
• The strategies consist of purchasing options, monitoring tools, and automation.
• New features that enable improved strategies continue to arrive, so customers should regularly review their practices.

Azure customers are likely familiar with purchasing options such as Azure Hybrid Benefit and reservations, but newer options, such as savings plan for compute and Premium SSD v2 disks, could bring more cost reductions. Furthermore, Advisor and Microsoft Cost Management regularly gain features to help with optimizations, and VM scale sets now offer automatic scaling based on machine learning predictions.

Cost optimization strategies typically involve multiple organizational personnel roles, such as budget overseers, IT staff, and development teams. These stakeholders will have different levels of Azure technical knowledge and access to deployment configurations. Organizations should assign the right group of people to continually work on the strategies rather than depend on a single person or department or ask too broad of a group to be responsible and accountable for Azure spending.