Although it sometimes feels as if the cloud era is as old as the Pharaohs we’re still in early days.
A sure indication of this is the often haphazard way some of the largest Azure projects are conducted from a cost governance POV. Consider the graphic below, which shows some of the key areas of concern
Each is a vital item such as business focused tagging and calculating unit economics (a big topic we’ll get into later) but today, let’s talk about Azure budgets.
A client whose Azure usage at ‘enterprise’ scale is only a few months old, has already generated approx. 500K in spend and yet, there are no budgets in sight.
Budgets (ideally aligned with larger org budget targets) and budget alerts should be one of the foundations of a cost management strategy (visualization shows how budgets are deployed on Azure)
Budgets/budget alerts are part of a forecasting strategy – and remember techies, your Finance and Value Chain colleagues are all about being able to forecast spend. So this org, growing its Azure estate without the budget/alert foundation laid is building without a blueprint (though not for long if I can help it!)
Azure FinOps 