Overview of cost management in Azure

There are two aspects to cost management in Azure: Billing and Cost Management.

Microsoft Azure has a large variety of resources and services, ranging from networking, storage, and virtual machines (Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS) to managed development platforms such as functions, pipelines, machine learning (ML), and analytics (Platform as a Service or PaaS) to out-of-the-box vertical software services such as Dynamics 365 and Office 365 (Software as a Service or SaaS).

All resources and services in Azure push usage data through a pipeline called the Microsoft Commerce pipeline. The pipeline then applies different discounts based on the price sheet that applies to your subscription (pay-as-you-go, fixed price, reservation plans, and so on). At the end, it looks for any pending credits that can be applied (service credits because of SLA violation, gift cards, and others) and, finally, publishes the bill.

For details on how billing...