6. Cost management for Azure solutions

In the previous chapter, we discussed tags, policies, and locks and how they can be leveraged from a compliance standpoint. Tags allow us to add metadata to our resources; they also help us in the logical management of resources. In the Azure portal, we can filter resources based on tags. If we assume there is a large number of resources, which is quite common in enterprises, filtering will help us to easily manage our resources. Another benefit of tags is that they can be used to filter our billing reports or usage reports in terms of tags. In this chapter, we are going to explore cost management for Azure solutions.

The primary reason why corporations are moving to the cloud is to save on cost. There is no upfront cost for having an Azure subscription. Azure provides a pay-as-you-go subscription, where billing is based on consumption. Azure measures resource usage and provides monthly invoices. There is no upper limit for Azure consumption...