A year ago, I released a book to the Kindle store on Azure Cost Management, “Azure Cost Management for Busy People“. You can check it out by clicking on this link for Amazon and this link for Kobo.
I didn’t write the book in hopes of retiring to the South of France on a yacht using its proceeds (though that would be a happy outcome).
I wrote it because, after years of working with clients, architecting and building Azure solutions and deploying a variety of artifacts I’ve noticed an emphasis on technical competency on the development, deployment and operations ends of things but significant weakness in three areas:
One.) Security
Two.) Governance
Three.) Cost Management
Cost Management, which is rightly considered a key part of Azure Governance, is, in my experience, often treated as an afterthought, a topic that comes up when the cloud spend climbs above an organization’s often not clearly defined ceiling. Fingers are pointed and conversations become uncomfortable.
Using Azure Cost Management – which is a business intelligence tool – this can be avoided. Cost Management’s Analysis tools provide a simultaneously business-friendly and data rich view of the sources of your spending while predictive analytics forecasts likely upcoming spending:
In addition to tracking current and predicting future spending, Azure Cost Management Budgets give you the ability to receive alerts when your spending (at the subscription, resource group or discrete artifact – such as virtual machine – level) approaches a configured limit. Budgets not only provide alerts, they can also be used to trigger actions in response to your Azure spend reaching your configured target using Azure Action Groups.
To learn more about what Azure Cost Management can do for your organization, pick up a copy of my book, check out the Microsoft documentation and invest some time viewing this excellent video overview:
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