Exploring billing options and using cost dashboards

It's very likely that a multi-cloud strategy will place several migrated systems into multiple different public clouds. With that, we are generating costs for pay-per-use instances and services, reserved instances for which companies have longer-term obligations, and, as explained in Chapter 10, Managing Licenses, also licenses. Invoices will arrive from different providers. How do we keep track of all that?

Let's have a look first at billing in the major cloud platforms being discussed in this book: Azure, AWS, and GCP. These platforms share the same billing approach: as soon as services are consumed on the platform, charges will begin to accrue to which the CSPs can send invoices. Typically, this is referred to as the billing account. We will be using the cost or billing dashboards from the clouds to view costs and invoices.

Using cost management and billing in Azure

Azure billing has three types of billing:

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