A blog about Azure Cost Management and Related Stuff
We’re now at a point in the still unfolding history of cloud computing when serious questions are being asked about cost which has led to the rise of FinOps as a practice area. Only a few years ago, during what we might call the ‘gold rush’ phase, large organizations, once they moved past ‘no cloud’ …
When it comes to managing your cloud costs, the last thing you want is to be surprised. So it's important to use whatever tools are available that help with monitoring and forecasting. On Azure, one such tool is the ability to subscribe to a cost view from the Azure Cost Analysis portal. Check out this …
Continue reading "Avoiding Surprises with Azure Cost Alerts"
Change takes time. The transition from one paradigm to another is never as quick as we’d like, or as it seems in memory. Today, it’s difficult to recall the resistance public cloud, as a method for providing key services such as computation and database, faced in an earlier stage. With this in-mind, let’s consider the …
One of the best ways to learn about the components of an Azure service and how those components fit together is by building on a tenant and taking note of how things unfold. I keep a personal tenant for this reason; something I recommend as a learning tool. But! Just as it's important to track …
Continue reading "Developing a FinOps Mindset (using Azure tools with costs in mind)"
This post, which is a follow-up to an earlier article, "Azure Synapse Analytics: Do Your Homework!", is about understanding how tagging is applied to platform services, using Azure Synapse Analytics as an example. Let's start this by reviewing the FinOps Lifecycle, as visually expressed in this FinOps Foundation graphic: FinOps Lifecycle from the FinOps Foundation …
Continue reading "Tagging Platform Resources: Azure Synapse as Example"
This post is about getting started with FinOps or, more specifically, how to cultivate a cloud optimization point of view and the obstacles you’re likely to face.. If you’re interested in starting a FinOps practice within your organization, this is for you. FinOps Personas from the FinOps Foundation We’ve reached an interesting point in the …
I think it was physicist David Bohm who, in his book, 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' stated that "good theories, unlike bad ones, are true, but only up to a certain point". In other words, it's possible to be right about something, but not as completely right as you may think; to dramatically condense Hegel, …
Continue reading "What is Azure Used For (is it just piles of VMs)?"
It has become a truism (because it's true) that cloud costs directly flow from architectural decisions. If, for example, you choose to build an N-tier application on Azure using virtual machines, and a database hosted on a VM, your runtime costs will be different (i.e., higher) than if you use cloud native tooling such as …
Continue reading "Architecture and Cost: Running the Numbers"
The movement of data from one place to another is one of the oldest and often, most difficult information technology activities. Add a transformation element, the classic ETL task, and things can become complex. On Azure, there are primarily two, platform native ways to perform data movement. One method is to use Azure Data Factory, …
Continue reading "Azure Data Pipelines: Comparing Data Factory and Synapse Cost Profiles"
If you follow this blog, you know that my focus is on using my cloud architectural skills, informed by FinOps principles, to analyze, understand and educate about the sources of cloud costs - specifically on the Azure platform but the concepts apply to any public cloud. Because of the writing, speaking and video creation I …
Azure FinOps 