So, you're doing cloud—now what?

The public cloud is becoming a mainstream technology staple for every modern company, and most customers have large, skilled, and experienced information technology (IT) teams that are converting from managing on-premises resources to hybrid or pure cloud.

One of the most neglected aspects of public clouds, from an IT department's point of view, is how to deal with recurrent, granular, and detailed cloud costs that are in no way associated with the old purchase process of on-premises resources and require technical skills to be fully understood.

Migrating entire data centers to the cloud is not the arrival point: it is, in fact, only the starting point of a journey toward a pay-as-you-go model, where technology changes along with mentality, ways of working (think of development-operations, more commonly known as DevOps), and flexibility all have a direct, daily, mutable impact on your IT spend, unlike anything you have ever managed before. The shift from capital expenditures (CapEx) on-premises to operational expenditures (OpEx) on the cloud is a major game-changer for every company, and—specifically—per meter billing is a challenge when moving from a fixed cost pattern to a variable and more fluid cost.

This chapter is dedicated to how Azure bills services and cloud objects, and how to retrieve all the necessary information to then proceed with the next step, which is choosing your own cloud spending strategy. The goal is for you to fully understand cloud billing and all its implications, from technical to financial.