Day 12: Deep Dive into Azure Cost Management & API Consumption Strategies

#ibbus #100daysoffinops #azurecostmanagement #finopssi

Cost Management is a set of tools for monitoring, allocating, and optimizing cloud costs across your Azure deployments.

The pricing structure is Azure offers two main approaches:

Consumption-based pricing: You only pay for actual API calls and processing time. This works great for variable workloads and can lead to significant savings compared to running dedicated infrastructure.

Dedicated pricing: For predictable, high-volume scenarios, you can opt for dedicated capacity with fixed pricing, making budgeting more straightforward.

Cost Management provides a comprehensive visual overview of usage and spending, but the catch is it only works for Azure resources (unless you pay extra.

The suite includes Price calculators, Cost Analysis, Cost Alerts, Budgets, Advisor Recommendations, and Budgets.

Once you’ve enabled it, Azure Cost Management runs continuously and generates real-time reports that provide insight into anomalies, trends, and opportunities for optimization.

Being a native tool that’s an integral part of the Azure environment, it integrates seamlessly with the Azure Advisor. With REST APIs, you can also integrate it with the Microsoft Power BI business intelligence platform.

Analyze usage patterns to identify areas where cost can be reduced or optimized.
Identify and fix billing errors.
Ensure compliance with corporate policies for spending and security.
Understand how changes in your cloud use affect costs.

Azure Pricing Calculator and Microsoft Cost Management are among the tools used in effective Azure cost optimization.

Azure Pricing Calculator offers insight into the potential costs of your proposed cloud architecture, helping you budget better. Microsoft Cost Management provides visibility of your Azure cloud spending and monitors, analyzes and reports it.

Azure Advisor is a tool that recommends improvements based on its assessment of your cloud environment’s security, costs, reliability, operational excellence and performance.

Cost recommendations from Azure Advisor are largely based on your resources’ usage data. When applicable, it will recommend switching to pricing models like Reservations or Savings Plan.

Azure API Management is a fully managed, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering by Microsoft Azure designed to help organizations securely publish, manage, protect, and monitor APIs across diverse environments, including on-premises, Azure, and other cloud platforms.

Azure API Management include the API gateway (data plane), which handles all incoming requests, enforces security policies such as authentication, rate limiting, and throttling, and routes traffic to the appropriate backend service.

The Cost Management APIs are available for both Azure Enterprise customers and those using the Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) billing model.