5 Steps to Achieving a Managed Azure Budget

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Agenda

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Chuck Hansen chuck.hansen@catapultsytems.com

• Azure Operations Manager at Catapult Systems

• 17 years in Infrastructure and Cloud Operations

Tony Nguyen tony.nguyen@catapultsystems.com

• 20+ years of IT and Consulting experience

• 10+ years in Cloud

Introductions

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What took you to the cloud?

Aging Data Center Hardware

Cloud Initiative and Agility

Building on newer technology

Acquisition/Divestiture

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Azure Cost Management

The things that keep our customers up at night are:

•Security

•Cost Management & Control

•Few cloud experienced staff

•Poor cloud ops practices & governance

•Cloud maturity level

•Impacts of Cloud consumption model

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What is your cloud maturity?

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The 5 steps for cost management are:

1. Budgeting – Setting manageable limits

2. Cost Analysis – Understanding where are you spending your money

3. Cost Review Process – Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly

4. Planning for Cost - Consumption plan/budget prior to deployment or change

5. Establish Cost Goals – Monthly/Quarterly targets

Cost Management 101

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Budget

Cost Analysis

Cost Reviews

Cost Planning

Cost Goals

Cost Management Cycle

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First step to any cost management approach is to set a budget number

1 - Budgeting

• Must be realistic

• Used last three months of cost data to define budget

• Remember it’s a baseline not a goal (not yet)

• Example here: $550 per month

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• Set budget amount

• Set budget alert

• Set budget scope

• Management Group

• Subscription

• Resource Group(s)

1- Budgeting

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1- Budgeting

Why?

• Establish a baseline to start tracking & communicating to the organization

• Business Units • Dev Team • Ops Team/IT

• Multiple budgets are needed to scope different environments, business units, applications, initiatives,…

• Rule of Thumb: Dev /QA = 30% of total budget

You cannot enforce cost management if you have not provided budget(s)!

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• Know what you spend

• Know your value

• Know your resources and services

• Azure Cost Management Tool

2 - Cost Analysis

• Management Group

• Subscription

• Resource Group

• Service Type / Name

• Resource / Resource Type

• Daily/Monthly/Accumulated

• Tags / Meter

• Meter/Meter Category

• Location…

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2 - Cost Analysis

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2

3 4 5 6

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2 - Cost AnalysisCost by Resource

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2 - Cost AnalysisCost by Service

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2 - Cost AnalysisCost by Resource Group Daily

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2 - Cost AnalysisCost by Resource Daily

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Four main review cycles for Cost Management & Control

1. Daily : 1-minute review of cost management dashboard

• Environment owners (subscription/resource group/…)

• Cost dashboard should be available to organization

3 – Cost Review Daily

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2. Weekly : As part of IT operational meeting or similar status meeting

• Review weekly costing trend

• Budget vs actual cost tracking

• Identify anomalies and expect changes to the cost curve

• Praise team(s) that maintain budget / call out team(s) that are not

3 – Cost Review Weekly

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3. Monthly : Budget review with responsible parties

• Budget vs actual cost tracking

• Actual vs expected systems consumption – especially for new/updated systems

• Tracking against cost measure goals/objectives for this quarter

• Adjustment to budget? If so, provide updates to organization

• Review Azure Advisor for Cost Recommendations

• Azure Spend – dive into top 10 cost items for analysis; Cost vs performance

3 – Cost Review Monthly

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4. Quarterly : Budget review with Management

• Review prior cost goals and objectives/establish new ones

• Consumption budgeting for finance – within commit/over commit/need more $$$

• Decision on Azure Reservation /Retention & Archive policy/Azure commit

• Architecture changes for cost saving as needed

3 – Cost Review Quarterly

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You need a dashboard:

• Should contain 80% to 90% of the information

• A simple but powerful tool is the Azure Cost Management + Billing feature within the Azure Portal – plus the build-in Azure Dashboard Feature

• For Microsoft Customer Agreement and Enterprise Agreement customers, you have access to Cost Management Power BI App (optional)

3 – Cost Review

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Build simple, effective cost dashboards & share them with the organization –> Cost Management & Azure Dashboards

• Create new/select existing dashboard

• Go to Cost Management – select your filter and “pin” the chart (pin will push it to the last dashboard you open)

3 – Cost Review Dashboards

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30 minutes to build

3 – Cost Review Dashboards

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Daily costs don’t lie

3 – Cost ReviewDashboards increase visibility

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Costing data must be provided as part of the release/approval process

• New deployment

• Update to existing ones

• Potential impact to budget

• Tracking expected cost vs actual cost

• Cost delta requires approval by the business

4 – Cost Planning

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4 – Cost Planning

Leverage existing Microsoft tools

Line items! Line Items! Line Items!

Don’t forget Dev/QA/Staging + Prod…

• Bandwidth – egress from region; ingress & egress for VNET peering/VPN; ingress cost for Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Insight; ingress for Front Door/Traffic Manager/Application Gateway…

Infra cost – Bandwidth, storage, backup/retention, licensing cost, IPs, Certificates…

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4 - Price Calculator

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Use the Price

Calculator to estimate

resource cost

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4 - Estimate the cost of your solution

Build scenarios for

advanced solution

estimates

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4 - Bandwidth

Plan for egress/ingress

and ingestion charges

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4 - Gateways

Don't forget about

gateways! Or App

Gateway/Front

Door/Traffic

Manager…

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4 - Cost Planning Workflow

Design solution

1

Estimate resource cost

2

Calculate scenario

estimates –including

backup/DR

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Plan for bandwidth

charges

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Don't forget about proxy

solutions

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Cost reduction requires:

• Clear, incremental objectives to achieve overall goals

• Each organization needs to establish cost management goal(s) that can be implemented and tracked over time

• Achieve cost goals without impacts to business operation or system stability

• Small achievable objectives – remember cost management is a secondary job for most IT/Dev teams (not their night job)

5 – Goals & Objectives

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Example: Goals is to reduce storage cost by 20%

Objectives:

• Reduce the number of Premium SDD storage accounts and disks –based on IOPS historical data (SQL backup drive can be HDD)

• Turn on storage life cycle management – thus allowing cold storage for archiving

• Reduce disk size if not used – you can always add more later, why pay for it now! (yes you can script it so it’s not an effort)

5 – Goals & Objectives

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Example: Goals is to get Dev and QA environments to be 30% of cost

Objectives:

• Consolidation VMs & usage of shared resource like Elastic Pool for SQL

• Resize VMs – think about B series or can we auto shut down daily?

• Resize App Service Plan – use dev/test plans

• No expensive disks/storage

• Remove unused resources

5 – Goals & Objectives

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Example: Goals is to reduce Prod VMs Compute cost by 25%(not including Reserved Instances)

Objectives:

• Identify top 10 VMs with highest cost

• Evaluate CPU, memory, and IOPS usage over the last quarter;resize if over-provisioned

• Repeat until goal is achieved or stop if environment is optimized already

5 – Goals & Objectives

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Cost Management:Wrap up

On-going

process

Must be disciplined

enough to be deliberate

with cost management

Very valuable to the

organization

Catapult Managed Services team

has consistently optimized our

clients’ costs with this process

Cost

management

Aligns cloud spend

to value

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3 Days

2 Cloud Experts

1 In-Depth Cloud

Topic (Of Your

Choosing!)

Azure 3-2-1 Cloud Management and Improvement Workshop

Q&AQuestions?

Thank you.