An Azure Cost Optimization Case Study
Mehmet Altuntas, Senior Azure Engineer, Transpire
Designing a cloud solution should focus on generating incremental value in the early stages. Use the pay-as-you-go strategy for the architecture and invest in scaling out, rather than delivering a large investment first version. The cost calculator is a good start to estimate the initial cost and operational costs. The following next step would be to establish policies, budgets, and controls that set cost limits for the solution.
The following example is mainly focused on optimizing the resources in DEV and TEST environment for one of the projects in the Azure platform.
In our early stages, we have initially invested the existing resources plan types and pointed out whether the business requirements were being served with the bare minimum resources especially in a development environment.
What we found out was due to the lack of the governance and DevOps which led the users to create number of any type of resources and used them for the applications.
The following picture depicts the cost for the DEV environment:
The following picture depicts the cost for the same environment after the Optimization:
The cost difference is obviously substantial.
What we essentially accomplished in a short term was an efficient process of building and releasing multiple applications (DevOps) with a set of resources (Infrastructure as Code) in DEV and TEST environment which are leveraging Azure Active Directory and Key Vault to secure the communication between the applications.
Principles
The following principles are crucial to build and sustain a cost-effective workload while staying within a given budget:
- Keep within the cost constraints
- Aim for scalable costs
- Pay for consumption
- Right resources, right size
- Monitor and optimize
We have also rectified the unused resources which do accumulate cost over the time. To prevent this issue is to apply policies from either a subscription or management level.
Recommendations
Some of the high level recommendations made for this project for the infrastructure team to put in place are listed below.
Code Security
- Leverage Azure Key Vault for DevOps and Applications securing the secrets
Governance — Security
- Policy Enforcement: Application of Governance Patterns that could be applied on Subscription Model, Resource Grouping, Resource Tagging, Log and Reporting
Governance — Cost
- Cost monitoring and reporting
- Incremental improvement of the policy statements
- Establish a budget
- Choose right resources, right size
Governance — Backup/Recovery
- Define and deploy Azure Recovery Service
- Backup strategies — run on schedule
Governance — Subscription
- Subscription topology should align with to the business
Hope you find this useful to help you go about optimising cost for Azure projects. Happy savings!
