This is part of theorganizational strategy when defining Azure, and it’s important to understand the segregation of data and resources and how this will be managed perpetually by the business. Some motivations to split out resource groups are separating resources by the following:
- Different business units (BUs) (Finance/IT/Marketing)
- Different environments (Dev/Test/UAT/PROD)
- Geographic (West Europe/Central US)
- Cost centers (could be the same as BUs or a unique code)
Tip
When defining governance around Azure, it’s important to define a naming convention that will be applied across multiple layers, including subscriptions. It’s recommended to identify a subscription location and purpose in the name—for example, WE_PROD.
Further reading
That brings this section to an end. In this section, we have learned about what subscriptions are, why they are necessary, strategic items to consider, and billing ownership associated with subscriptions.
We encourage you to read up further by using the following links:
- Initial subscription strategy: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ready/azure-best-practices/ initial-subscriptions
- Multi-subscription strategy: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ready/azure-best-practices/ scale-subscriptions
Managing costs
Azure Cost Management + Billing is a suite of tools designed to assist in the analysis, management, and cost optimization of Azure workloads. It assists in the following management tasks relating to costs:
- Billing administration tasks
- Managing billing access
- Reports on cost and usage data
- Configuration of budgets
- Identifying opportunities to optimize costs
Cost Management
Cost Management contains many facets and should be considered in its entirety; this includes costs analysis, governance, and reporting. For the purpose of the exam, we will investigate cost analysis and report scheduling.
Cost analysis
Cost analysis assists in understanding expenditure within Azure. Quick reports are automatically generated to provide insights into current and historical expenditure on the scope chosen. Further to understanding current costs, the utility predicts anticipated forecast expenditure for the month ahead.
In the following screenshot, you will notice expenditure on an Area chart on the top portion of the report that shows accumulative expenditure over the course of the current billing period (this is a filter that can be changed), with some charts below that signify costs by Service name, Location, and Resource group name values. It is good to note that Azure also provides insights into the forecasted cost, as you can see for the following subscription. This will be invaluable in predicting your estimated expenditure:
Figure 4.25 – Cost analysis
Additional filters can be added and modified depending on the desired preference for viewing costs. Costs can also be exported for view in Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Excel, and comma-separated values (CSV) format by clicking on the Download button, as illustrated in the following screenshot:
Figure 4.26 – Cost analysis: Download
Select the appropriate download option and click Download charts, as illustrated in the following screenshot:
Figure 4.27 – Cost analysis: Download options
Now that you have experienced working with cost analysis data and exporting the data, we will look at how to schedule reports desired from Azure.
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