The guide to Azure cost optimization

It was no surprise that Gartner forecasted that overall public cloud consumption will grow, hitting $304.9 billion in 2021. Gartner's research also indicates that the vast majority of organizations overshoot their cloud infrastructure budgets due to a lack of cost optimization approaches.

To help address this issue, we’ve published our Microsoft Azure Cost Optimization Guide, focusing both on best practices for setting up comprehensive cloud governance as well as on practical, hands-on cloud cost management. This will empower you to take control of your Azure infrastructure costs, both now and into the future. Read on for a sneak peek of what you will find in the guide 

Azure cloud governance 

In the first section of our guide, we outline how to create financial accountability and efficiency in the cloud, ideally by involving all those who are involved in Azure cloud consumption across the organization. Here are the cloud governance topics we cover in depth: 

• Understanding your organization’s needs 
• Creating cross-organizational alignment 
• Using tagging and cloud spend monitoring methods and tools 
• Assessing and prioritizing savings opportunities 
• Establishing ongoing processes that reduce costs today and in the future 

Download the Azure Cost Optimization Guide today! 

Practical tips and best practices for Azure cost management  

Within Azure's sprawling ecosystem of IaaS and PaaS offerings, we’ve focused primarily on how to reduce cost for Azure compute, storage and networking infrastructure. These areas provide ample opportunities for optimization, and in the second section of our guide we cover: 

• Successfully running mission-critical workloads on Azure’s highly affordable spot instances 
• Everything you need to know about maximizing utilization for Azure reserved instances (RIs) 
• Regional pricing differences  
• How tiering can significantly impact storage cost and availability 
• Identifying and eliminating unused cloud resources 
• Azure’s B-Series VMs 
• Networking optimization 
• Special Azure pricing offers 

Automated cost optimization for Azure 

Taking steps to reduce and control cloud infrastructure costs requires ongoing effort and diligence that could all too easily consume significant amounts of time for already overstretched CloudOps teams.   

To help address that challenge, Spot has created a suite of products for Azure built on unique machine learning and analytics, that go beyond cloud visibility and guidance to actually automate Azure workloads on an optimal blend of spot VMs, reserved instances and, if needed, pay-as-you-go pricing. All of this is provided without compromising availability, performance and flexibility, ensuring optimized infrastructure for scale-out applications, Kubernetes workloads and more.