The Azure FinOps Guide

This article centralizes Azure FinOps (Financial Operations) information and tools to enabling a better understanding and optimization of cloud costs.

 

The main purposes of this guide is to help customers do more with less by:

• Identifying cost-saving opportunities
• Optimizing cloud efficiency
• Gaining a better understanding and control of cloud costs

 

Contribution to this guide 

The community is encouraged to contribute to this guide!
For any content suggestion please visit this GitHub Repository.

 

Table Of Contents

• What is FinOps?
• Overview
• Tools
• Ways to Optimize
• Assessment
• Learning
• Books
• Content
• General
• Calculators
• Cost Management
• Advisor
• Azure Reservations
• Savings Plans
• Azure Hybrid Benefit
• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• App Service
• AKS
• Azure Stack HCI
• Storage
• Azure Monitor
• Microsoft Sentinel
• Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD)
• Azure Logic Apps
• Azure Functions
• Azure VMware Solution
• Networking
  • Azure Front Door
  • Azure Application Gateway
• Data
  • Azure Synapse
  • Azure SQL Database
  • Azure SQL Managed Instance
  • Azure Database for MySQL
  • Azure Database for PostgeSQL
  • Azure Cosmos DB
  • Azure Stream Analytics
  • Azure Databricks
• Azure AI Services
  
  • Azure OpenAI Service
• FOCUS

 

 

 

 

What is FinOps?

FinOps is an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, IT, and business teams to collaborate to take advantage of the variable cost model of the cloud.

 

FinOps = Finance + DevOps

FinOps is a portmanteau of "Finance" and "DevOps", stressing the communications and collaboration between business and engineering teams.

 

The Culture

At its core, FinOps is a cultural practice. It’s the way for teams to manage their cloud costs, where everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage supported by a central best-practices group.

 

Cross-functional

Cross-functional teams in Engineering, Finance, Product, etc. work together to enable faster product delivery, while at the same time gaining more financial control and predictability.

 

The Framework

The FinOps Framework, a set of best practices, standards, and guidance by the FinOps Foundation and its open-source community, is based on the following six principles which act as the north star objectives of the FinOps guidance.

 

The Principles

• Teams need to collaborate
• Decisions are driven by the business value of cloud
• Everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage
• FinOps reports should be accessible and timely
• A centralized team drives FinOps
• Take advantage of the variable cost model of the cloud

 

FinOps includes activities such as:

• Analyzing and reducing cloud expense
• Maximizing cost-efficiency
• Improving the overall return on investment (ROI) of cloud services

FinOps professionals use a variety of tools and techniques to achieve these goals, including:

• Cost optimization strategies
• Cost allocation and reporting tools
• Real-time monitoring and alerting systems

They also work closely with other teams, such as engineering and operations, to ensure that cloud resources are used effectively and efficiently.

 

FinOps aims to help organizations get the most value out of their cloud investments by optimizing their cloud expenditure and maximizing the efficiency of their cloud usage. This can help organizations to reduce costs, improve the performance of their applications and services, and increase their overall competitiveness.

 

 

 

 

Overview

 

What was the motivation for creating the guide?

As a cloud engineer, I work with different types of customers, including enterprises, startups, ISVs (independent software vendors), and digital native companies. In today's economic climate, cost, efficiency, and optimization are the top priorities of all customers.

 

Optimizing and reducing cloud costs can be challenging due to the dispersed nature of relevant information.

To address this issue, I have written this 'Azure FinOps Guide', a comprehensive resource that combines all Azure FinOps information to make customers' life easier.

 

Who is the audience for this guide?

The audience for this guide includes organizations that use Azure cloud services and are interested in optimizing, monitoring, and reducing their cloud costs. This may include:

• Financial decision-makers within businesses of all sizes
• Cloud engineers
• IT professionals
• ISVs (independent software vendors) that provide cloud-related services to their clients and want to optimize their cost-efficiency

 

How to use this guide?

Use the table of contents below to locate a specific tool, topic, or services you are interested in, such as cost optimization techniques or strategies for improving cloud efficiency.

 

Examples

• Want to see ways to optimize your cloud expense:
  • Navigate to the "How to Optimize?" section.
  • Choose a specific topic from the list to learn more.
• If you are interested in optimizing and saving on your storage costs:
  • Navigate to the "Content" section.
  • Select the "Storage" sub-section to find relevant topics.
  • Choose a specific topic from the list to learn more.

 

Tools

The table below contains a collection of native tools that are related to FinOps on Azure:

 

 

Ways to Optimize

This table contains a list of techniques to optimize and reduce your cloud environment's total cost of ownership.

 

 

Assessment

You can run a free self-cost management assessment on your environment to examine your efficiency.

For more information, see Azure Well-Architected Review | Assessments

 

 

Learning

Here is a list of learning path references related to FinOps on Azure:

Learning Path

Learning Path Modules:

 

 

Books

List of books references related to FinOps on Azure:

 

 

Content

This content summary brings together a wealth of information and resources on the discipline of FinOps in the cloud.

It covers a wide range of topics, domains, products, and resources collected from different channels like:

• Microsoft Tech Community (Blog Posts)
• Microsoft Azure (Official Docs)
• Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft Ignite
• Azure Friday
• YouTube
• GitHub

Whether you are new to FinOps or are an experienced professional, this summary is an invaluable resource for staying up-to-date with the latest developments and trends in the field.

 

General

 

 

Calculators

 

 

Cost Management

 

 

Advisor

 

 

Azure Reservations

 

List of services that supported reservations:

 

 

 

Azure Savings Plan

 

 

Azure Hybrid Benefit

 

 

Virtual Machines

 

** Azure Reservations for Virtual Machines.

** Azure Savings Plans for Virtual Machines.

** Azure Hybrid Benefit for Virtual Machines (Windows VM, Linux VM, SQL VM)

 

Virtual Machine Scale Sets

 

 

App Service

 

 

AKS

 

 

Azure Stack HCI

 

 

Storage

 

 

Azure Monitor

 

Microsoft Sentinel

 

 

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD)

 

 

Azure Logic Apps

 

 

Azure Functions

 

Azure VMware Solution (AVS)

 

 

Networking

 

Azure Front Door

 

Azure Application Gateway

 

 

Data

 

Azure Synapse

 

 

Azure SQL Database

 

** Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure SQL Database.

 

 

Azure SQL Managed Instance

 

** Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Managed Instance.

 

 

Azure Database for MySQL

 

 

Azure Database for PostgreSQL

 

 

Azure Cosmos DB

 

 

Azure Stream Analytics

 

 

Azure Databricks

 

 

 

Azure AI Services

 

Azure OpenAI Service

 

FOCUS

The FinOps and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) is an open-source specification that defines clear requirements for cloud vendors to produce consistent cost and usage datasets.

It is founded to normalizes cost and usage datasets across cloud vendors and reduces complexity for FinOps Practitioners.

For more details read here.

 

 

 

I would appreciate it if you could tell me what you think of this Azure FinOps Guide.

Your thoughts and suggestions will help me improve it, so please don't hesitate to leave your feedback below.