Microsoft Pricing: The Return of Complexity

Once upon a time, not that long ago, everyone who’d spent time wrestling with Microsoft licensing looked to, at first, Office 365 (as it was known before rebranding) and later, Azure, as a source of relief. “Relief” might be too strong; certainly, simplification. To focus on Azure, the subject of this blog, there was an …

Azure FinOps – Back to Basics

FinOps, or, financial operations, is still a new practice area. Even so, we are starting to see the same type of drift in definition that has diluted the meaning of DevOps (which once meant, quite simply, the tight integration of development and operations to create a more agile - in the original sense of that …

ChatGPT (and related) From a FinOps Perspective

If you’re in the business of deploying technology to, well, business, unless you’ve been sheltering in a cave, you’re aware that Microsoft has deepened its partnership with OpenAI by making the latter’s services available via Azure. Since my focus is on FinOps and the impact of an organization’s technology choices on cloud runtime costs, one …

Start Using Azure Reservations!

We’re now at a point in the still unfolding history of cloud computing when serious questions are being asked about cost which has led to the rise of FinOps as a practice area.  Only a few years ago, during what we might call the ‘gold rush’ phase, large organizations, once they moved past ‘no cloud’ …

Avoiding Surprises with Azure Cost Alerts

When it comes to managing your cloud costs, the last thing you want is to be surprised. So it's important to use whatever tools are available that help with monitoring and forecasting. On Azure, one such tool is the ability to subscribe to a cost view from the Azure Cost Analysis portal. Check out this …

Stumbling Towards FinOps

Change takes time.  The transition from one paradigm to another is never as quick as we’d like, or as it seems in memory. Today, it’s difficult to recall the resistance public cloud, as a method for providing key services such as computation and database, faced in an earlier stage. With this in-mind, let’s consider the …

Developing a FinOps Mindset (using Azure tools with costs in mind)

One of the best ways to learn about the components of an Azure service and how those components fit together is by building on a tenant and taking note of how things unfold. I keep a personal tenant for this reason; something I recommend as a learning tool. But! Just as it's important to track …

Tagging Platform Resources: Azure Synapse as Example

This post, which is a follow-up to an earlier article, "Azure Synapse Analytics: Do Your Homework!", is about understanding how tagging is applied to platform services, using Azure Synapse Analytics as an example. Let's start this by reviewing the FinOps Lifecycle, as visually expressed in this FinOps Foundation graphic: FinOps Lifecycle from the FinOps Foundation …

How Do You Get Started in FinOps?

This post is about getting started with FinOps or, more specifically, how to cultivate a cloud optimization point of view and the obstacles you’re likely to face.. If you’re interested in starting a FinOps practice within your organization, this is for you. FinOps Personas from the FinOps Foundation We’ve reached an interesting point in the …

What is Azure Used For (is it just piles of VMs)?

I think it was physicist David Bohm who, in his book, 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' stated that "good theories, unlike bad ones, are true, but only up to a certain point". In other words, it's possible to be right about something, but not as completely right as you may think; to dramatically condense Hegel, …