Azure Cost Management overview & examples

Tanguy SCHOUBERT
Published by Tanguy SCHOUBERT
Category : Azure
04/07/2018

Azure Cost Management overview

Created by the company Cloudyn, Azure Cost Management is a tool that allows to easily supervise all the expenses related to a Cloud subscription. It is compatible with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. The concept is to optimize the budget management to be as close as possible of the philosophy “pay as you go”, by identifying unused resources for example.

To supervise a cloud budget, Azure Cost Management offers several methods. For instance, it is possible to configure some thresholds above which some alerts are automatically sent. It is also possible to generate automatic personalized reports. This way, the user is able to optimize its expenses and to detect anomalies as well. To generate useful recommendations, the tool analyzes the real utilization of the resources linked to a subscription. Finally, what you can do is to split the budget into several entities. It can be useful if several distinct budgets have to be handled within the global management of resources.

The price depends on the subscription annual expense.

Azure AWS GCP
Standard Free 1% of annual cloud spend 1% of annual cloud spend
Premium FreeThrough June 2018 1% of annual cloud spend 1% of annual cloud spend

Examples

For each type of existing VM in a subscription, Azure Cost Management can display the equivalent instances in other cloud platforms. Here is an example for some VM in AWS, with their matching equivalents (based on ECU) within Azure. This way we can compare the two offers in terms of price, CPU, RAM, etc…

However, this information table is quite generic. It allows to have a global view on the different possibilities offered by the three concurrent clouds. But still, the recommendations are not really based on real utilization of the resources. In order to have personalized recommendations, let us say that we want to transfer a VM from Azure to Google Cloud. When we indicate that to Azure Cost Management, it is able to indicate the best VM which should be chosen in Google Cloud based on the previous utilization of the VM we had in Azure. In the following example the VM has been underutilized. That is why the tool advises the user to chose a more modest offer in terms of power.

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