Cost Management In Azure
Azure’s Cost Management Portal is rather more simplified than AWS. From the Azure portal, you
have to go to the Cost Management + Billing Section.
The three main elements of Azure Cost Management
and Billing are –
Cost Analysis
The cost analysis section gives you an overview of the cost
incurred by you in a visualised way. The bars and pie charts help you understand
what is costing how much. The reports from the cost analysis section can be
generated on the basis of scopes. Granularity is the keyword here. You can see what
services at what location under which resource groups are costing you how much
money.
Cost Alerts and Budgets
With the budgets option, you can set budgets for each of your
subscriptions. Just like AWS, you can use alerts to alert you when the cost reaches
a certain percent of the set budget.
Advisor Recommendations
With Advisor Recommendations, Azure recommends steps that you
can take to save more money. For example, if you have an IP address that is not
connected with any Azure instance, Azure will recommend you to delete it in order to
save your money.
The Problem With Azure
Although the cost management section might look simplified, setting up Azure billing entities
can be really painful.
- While purchasing Azure, you have to create
Billing Hierarchy. Creating billing hierarchy requires skill and patience. It is
quite difficult to wrap your head around.
- Setting up billing entities hierarchy can be
further complicated considering the fact that Azure has different subscription plans
for enterprise customers, Payg customers or MCA customers.
- Along with the Billing hierarchy, you also have
to set up a resource entity hierarchy.
So you see, the overall concept is quite difficult to understand, This can spill further onto
the actual cost management.
Along with this, Azure is known for its insufficient documentation. Azure has to update its
services every now and then in order to catch up with Amazon. This makes the following Azure
documentation a painful task.
The lack of good documentation makes the Azure learning curve steep. When it
comes to cost management, with such hierarchical scopes, it becomes complex to know the big
picture. And then there is the lack of visibility. The cost reports are not presented
upfront. Rather it is presented in a scope-wise manner. So it becomes tedious to know what
scope incurred how much cost.
Working With Azure And AWS Together
Today companies tend to opt for both Azure and AWS to get the best from both
and to avoid vendor lockin. But as a result, the companies lose a unified way of
managing the two cloud platforms. True, you can integrate AWS with Azure, but the
requirement of manual set up scares many people from doing so.
