It’s no longer a secret: Azure has become one of the largest and most sought-after cloud solutions for many businesses. The flexibility, scalability and adaptability of the cloud services on Azure encourage many organizations to choose it.
However, the problem that few users of this cloud platform talk about is how they waste resources on some things they don’t need. Especially for businesses, Azure can take a lot of the money you spend on cloud services if you don’t monitor them closely, hence the introduction of FinOps. In this article, you will get complete knowledge of how to use the principle of FinOps to reduce Azure cloud costs.
Understanding the meaning of FinOps
Before diving into Azure FinOps best practices and principles, it is crucial to define the main term itself. FinOps is a concept that states that organizations or businesses do not need to waste too many resources to perform at the highest level. In other words, he advocates for optimizing companies’ financial and technology services to ensure there is no waste.
Many businesses waste more resources than necessary, which eats up the finances and, more importantly, the efficiency of an organization. FinOps is about every team in an organization coming together to make informed decisions about reducing their cloud costs without impacting their performance. By having a comprehensive overview of FinOps, organizations can use tools like Globaldots to gain much-needed insights into what they can improve to eliminate wasted resources. In this context, we will talk about FinOps as it relates to the Azure tool, although it can be applied to any web and cloud application.
How to reduce Azure costs using FinOps principles
● Gain visibility into Azure cloud costs
An organization is in a bad position if it does not know or have a good idea of how much it has spent on its Azure cloud resources. The good news is that even Azure provides specific tools and features to help an organization gain cost visibility, but few people use it.
The first step to gaining visibility into Azure costs is to use Azure Cost Management and Billing. This is a feature of this cloud resource that allows an organization or individual to have a complete overview of how much they have spent on this tool. The best part about this tool is that the data is so detailed that it can help create cost reports and even set up budget alerts. Basically, the function of this tool is to provide detailed insight into a company’s spending trends.
Second, an organization should learn how to use Azure Monitor, another tool that can help them get a detailed overview of their Azure costs. This tool shows an organization how much it spends and the performance and usage data of its cloud resources. This way, they can get detailed data that lets them know if and how well they are actually using the resources they are paying for.
● Optimize or correctly size your virtual machine (VM) and disk size
Choosing the right VM and disk size is undoubtedly a headache for many organizations, but it can help reduce the cost of using Azure. Optimizing these two components is only possible when there is already visibility into the current size of an organization’s virtual machines and disks. A business needs to know the actual CPU and memory requirements of its virtual machine while considering potential misuse.
Potential misuse of a VM or disk only occurs when overprovisioning. Resizing a VM or disk does not mean that an organization should choose the cheapest to reduce costs. Depending on the needs of an organization, they can choose a standard SSD storage option over a premium SSD, provided they can still reach their maximum performance with it. More importantly, optimizing also means paying for the resources an organization actually uses.
● Use reserved instances
There are many pricing models on Azure, and some of the two main types are pay-as-you-go and reserved instances. The pay-as-you-go model is primarily intended for short-term projects and is generally characterized by higher costs. The other popular pricing model is Reserved Instances, which simply involves paying for a cloud resource for an extended period of time.
The benefit of using Reserved Instances is the percentage discounts offered by Azure, many of which are as high as 70%. However, as mentioned, this only concerns cloud resources that will be used frequently for an extended period of time. Some users trade pay-as-you-go models for long-term cloud resources and Reserved Instances for short-term resources.
● Use Azure tags for cost allocation
Using Azure tags is a strategy that can change the difficulty level of tracking the cost of multiple Azure resources used by different services in an organization. Many companies know that they are overspending on their Azure resources, but the problem usually lies in their location in different sections of the organization.
Azure tags allow an organization or business to label their Azure resources based on the service that uses them and their function. Azure metadata tags even provide a very advanced tracking feature that includes more information about that particular resource.
Advanced Azure Cloud optimization tools Like Globaldots, they allow automatic copying of tags from the global resource group. Additionally, it is essential to note that the problem with tagging Azure resources is either not doing them at all or doing them excessively.
Wrap
If not managed properly, the amount of money an organization or individual will spend on Azure cloud resources and services will spiral out of control. Introducing FinOps and implementing this concept correctly ensures that an organization does not experience mind-boggling waste at this cloud service provider.
Some ways to optimize Azure cloud cost and performance are to gain visibility into the amount spent and optimize cloud resources. Other Finops principles that will be useful in this case are the use of Azure Tags and Reserved Instances.
