Cost Management

Know the bill before it arrives

Use the Azure pricing calculator to estimate a design before building it, and remember the hidden lines: data egress, log ingestion, public IPs, idle disks and backups. Cost Management shows actual spend by subscription, resource group, service and tag, so consistent tags such as env, owner and costCenter pay off. Create budgets with alert thresholds (for example at 80% and 100%). To reduce cost: right-size resources using Azure Advisor's recommendations; deallocate or auto-shutdown dev VMs; use autoscale and scale-to-zero services; move cold data to cheaper tiers; commit to steady workloads with Reservations (one or three years for specific resources) or a Savings plan for compute (an hourly spend commitment that is more flexible across services and regions); and use Azure Hybrid Benefit if you already own Windows Server or SQL Server licences.

A monthly budget with an alert

Budgets do not stop resources; they notify you so a person can act.

az consumption budget create \
  --budget-name shop-dev-monthly \
  --amount 20000 \
  --category cost \
  --time-grain monthly \
  --start-date 2026-10-01 --end-date 2027-09-30 \
  --resource-group rg-shop-dev-cin
# then add notification thresholds and contact emails in Cost Management

az advisor recommendation list --category Cost -o table

An electricity meter with a buzzer

Cost Management is the meter on the wall, tags tell you which room is using power, and a budget is a buzzer that sounds at 80%. It does not switch the lights off; someone still has to walk over and do it.

Quick check: A VM runs 24×7 for the next three years with a fixed size. What usually gives the largest discount?

• Spot VMs
• A three-year reservation (or savings plan)
• Moving disks to Archive tier
• A budget alert