Chapter 4: Planning for Cost Savings – Right-Sizing

In the previous chapters, we have provided all the relevant elements to be able to understand, export, analyze, and monitor your Azure cloud costs. It is now time to learn how to save money by identifying all the possible actions that can reduce your spending, while still leaving a good balance between the performance and reliability of your applications.

This is the first chapter dedicated to cost saving, and it starts, as mentioned often in the first three chapters, with changing the long-used information technology (IT) culture of overallocating servers to a strict, Lean, and Agile mentality of using just the right amount of resources.

We will learn how to tackle right-sizing for virtual machine (VM), storage, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) services, and then prepare internal policies for on/off and on-demand automation. Lastly, we'll finish this chapter with a non-exhaustive list of logic and workflows to help...