Setting guidelines and principles for provisioning and consumption

This chapter is about keeping control of costs while provisioning resources to cloud environments. Let's start with saying that the sky is the limit in these clouds, but unfortunately, most companies do have limits to their budgets. So, we will need to set principles and guidelines and what divisions or developers are allowed to consume in the cloud environments, to avoid budgets being overrun.

To be able to set these guidelines and principles, we need to understand what these public clouds have to offer. Let's have a look at Azure first.

Using the Azure pricing calculator

It's easy to get an overview of what a VM would cost us in Azure: the pricing overview on https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ is a very handy tool for this.

If we open the page, we can look at the Virtual Machines tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.3 – The...