As a Cloud Solutions Architect focused on creating tools to minimize waste in Azure, I'm curious to hear from people who work with Azure daily. I have a few questions to get the discussion going:
- Where do you notice money slipping away in your Azure environment?
- What tools do you currently use, and what issues have you encountered with them?
- If you could change one aspect of how your team handles Azure spending, what would it be?
5 Answers
Log analytics can really hit the wallet hard. I've seen unexpected costs soar when configurations go wrong, like with API Management, leading to a huge increase in traffic that you don't see coming. What makes it worse is that setting a cap on spending can prevent essential logs from being collected. It’s tricky trying to manage costs with multiple log analytics workspaces, especially to protect against DDoS attacks.
Moving logs to Azure Data Explorer was a game changer for us, but yeah, managing multiple log analytics instances can be a hassle.
Private endpoints can also sneak up on budgets, especially if you have a lot of services. It's wild how quickly the costs can multiply, and I've never quite understood the need for them when proper authentication should suffice.
For sure! It's kind of a legacy thought process to need private endpoints in the cloud.
Yes! If you've got good security in place, paying more for private endpoints feels unnecessary.
I see logging as a big issue as well. It's an area where costs can pile up quickly if you're not paying attention, especially for non-production resources that stay running 24/7 without anyone noticing how much they cost.
Are you using any automation tools to help manage those non-prod resources?
Exactly! Those resources look small individually, but they add up to a lot.
One hidden cost I encountered was with the run history of logic apps. I had one polling every few minutes, and with the default 90 days of storage, it racked up around 5TB! That quickly got expensive until I set the history to 7 days and reduced the polling frequency.
Wow, 5TB is insane! There really should be better default settings to avoid that.
Absolutely! That's a prime example of how cloud services can surprise you with hidden costs.
To really tackle Azure spending, I believe we need to implement proper FinOps practices across teams. It's crucial for reviewing costs effectively and identifying misconfigured resources. For us, that's something we are trying to do now, as there is often unused or poorly designed resources. If I could change one thing, it would be implementing automatic cost controls to prevent needless spending.
That sounds like a solid plan! Which tools are you looking at to help with FinOps?
I think setting some rules for non-critical workloads could save a ton.
I totally understand your point about log analytics bills being insane. It's a tricky balance trying to manage costs without compromising on necessary logging.