Cost control in the Azure Cloud

A big advantage of the cloud is that costs are 100% transparent. The costs of each resource are always visible over days, months or years. The following hacks show how you can always keep an overview in the Azure Cloud.

By Manuel Meyer

The topic of costs has changed in the cloud context in recent years. At the beginning, the general opinion was that the move to the cloud was primarily driven by cost benefits. In the meantime, however, it has become clear that the path to the cloud brings enormous advantages, especially with regard to the agility of IT and consequently the IT-supported business processes.

Whether the move to the cloud also leads to cost savings depends primarily on the design of the solutions and the cost control and optimisation. But one advantage is indisputable: solutions in the cloud are 100% transparent in terms of costs.

Noob Hack

The Cost Management application is a component of the Azure Portal. The Cost Analysis feature shows the current costs and the projected costs until the end of the month for any given period.

Pro Hack

With a little configuration, you can dive deep into the cost structure of Azure in Cost Management. The allocation of costs in Azure is done by assigning consumption (usage) to so-called "meters". A meter can be thought of as a parking meter that charges for "something". Examples of meters are "a D4_V3 VM", "a P30 disk" or "data transfer". The charging by meter type can also be viewed in Cost Management. The following settings are necessary for this:

Time period: <the desired time period>
Group by: "Resource"
Granularity: "Monthly"
Graph Type: "Table"

The picture shows, for example, that the virtual machine "vm0001" caused costs of CHF 163.04 for the compute power and costs of CHF 0.06 for the bandwidth.

Find out more about costs in the cloud from Manuel Meyer here!