Building a cost-effective & resilient Azure Infrastructure

Cloud is like a credit card: easy to spend, hard to pay off. Without planning, you might end up with a massive bill at the end of the month. To avoid costly surprises, here’s an essential checklist of best practices in Azure, along with official documentation links to help you implement them right away.

📊 Monitoring & Cost Control

• Monitoring → Use Azure Monitor to collect real-time metrics, logs, and traces from your Azure resources.
• Budget Alerts → Set spending limits and receive notifications with Azure Cost Management – Budgets.
• Usage Tracking → Understand your resource consumption with Azure Cost Management. For advanced analysis, check out the Azure FinOps Toolkit.
• Daily Review → Use Azure Advisor for daily recommendations on cost optimization, security, and performance.

🏗️ Architecture Optimization

• Architecture Review → Follow best practices with the Azure Architecture Center and Well-Architected Framework.
• Right Sizing → Optimize VM sizes and other resources using recommendations from Azure Advisor – Right Sizing. See also this great video about right sizing
• Spot Instances → Cut costs by running fault-tolerant workloads with Azure Spot Virtual Machines.
• Reserved Instances → Save on predictable workloads by purchasing Azure Reserved Instances.
• Real Auto-Scaling → Use Azure Autoscale to dynamically adjust service capacity based on demand.

🛠️ Governance & Maintenance

• Housekeeping → Automate resource cleanup using Azure Automation or even using Azure Functions.
• Kill Idle Resources → Schedule auto-shutdown for unused VMs with Automated Shutdown. Use the Azure Optimization Workbook to detect idle resources.
• Clean Up Old Volumes → Remove unattached disks with Manage Unused Disks and leverage the Azure Governance Workbook to track down forgotten resources.
• Archive Logs → Configure the retention and archiving policies to reduce costs with Azure Storage Lifecycle Management.
• Review Permissions → Manage and audit access using Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure only authorized users can access critical resources and follow the RBAC best practices published here.

Final Thoughts

Implement this checklist today and turn your infrastructure into something resilient, optimized, and cost-efficient.

💡 Pro Tip: Schedule regular reviews, use automation, and set up alerts to keep everything under control.