This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Managing costs is a skillset that we need to learn when managing resources in the cloud, it is a change from running your resources on-premises. Managing costs can feel a bit overwhelming but it should be a team job, folks from your IT department, Finance Department and even your senior leadership all have a role to play in the whole process.


 


There are actions you can take when designing workloads or actions after your workloads are implemented to help save on costs.  In this video I look at ten things that you can do or implement that will help with your overall costs.


 


 



  1. Take advantage of Azure Advisor’s recommendations regarding performance, security and cost.

  2. Right size your workloads for their needs, no need to have resources allocated that you don’t need.

  3. Look at utilising different regions to make use of cheaper services, if that makes sense for your workloads.

  4. If you know you’ll be running a certain workload for certain amount of time look at utilising Azure Reservations.

  5. Leverage existing software license or subscription investments and see if you can enable Azure Hybrid Use.

  6. Spot Virtual Machines take advantage of unused capacity within the Azure datacentres, see if you can incorporate them into your workload design.

  7. If you’re not using a virtual machine for days, or even weeks at a time shutdown it down, don’t pay for something you aren’t using.

  8. Free Services, there are a bunch of services within Azure that are either entirely free or have free tiers, find out about them, and see where they can find in with your design and workload management strategy.

  9. Take advantage of Azure Dev/Test Labs’s templated environment setup to allow people to spin up environments when they need to try or test something, it can help in the overall management of your IT department if some process are “self-service”.

  10. Microsoft Learn is a great place to learn Azure, with constant new and updated content and free sandbox environments available for you to get hands on with the service.


Join us over on our community Discord server to chat more about cost management and saving tips!

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.