Whether you’re a newbie, a thriving startup, or a large corporation, you have financial constraints and need to know how much to spend, where to spend it, and how to plan for it. No one wants surprises when it comes to their bills, and that’s where Cost Management comes in.
We’re always happy to learn more about your challenges and help you with Cost Management to better understand where your costs are coming from in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize your costs so you can do more with less. I’m looking for a way to do it. . Here are some of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:
Let’s dig into the details.
Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) costs
View costs
We’re excited to share that the AKS Cost View is now generally available in Cost Analysis. This was officially announced at Kubecon held in Paris last month. We announced a preview of these views at Ignite in November 2023.
AKS users have always been able to see the infrastructure costs of running their clusters. These new views give you visibility into the cost of namespaces running in your cluster, as well as an aggregated view of cluster costs across subscriptions. These additional insights can help users allocate and optimize AKS costs more efficiently to maximize the benefits of running workloads on shared infrastructure. To enable these views, users must install the Cost Analysis add-on on their cluster.
Please see the two articles below for more details.
Fleet workload placement
An additional announcement from Kubecon that I would like to highlight is the expansion of fleet workload placement to schedule workloads on clusters based on new heuristics such as cost and resource availability. For more information, see “Scheduling and overriding open source fleet workload placement.”
Azure Reservations auto-renew
Azure Reservations can significantly reduce resource costs by up to 72% at pay-as-you-go pricing. To simplify your reservation management and continue to receive discounts on your reservations, you can now set up automatic renewal of your reservations. Upon purchase. This setting is off by default, so be sure to turn it on before your pre-order expires. For more information, see “Auto-Renew Azure Reservations – Manage Costs | Microsoft Run.”
Connector for Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Expiration Date: March 31, 2025
The Connector for AWS will be retired from Cost Management in March. 31st, 2025. After the expiration date, you will no longer be able to access your AWS data through the API or portal, but you will still be able to access the data you stored in your S3 bucket in the AWS console. We have removed the ability to add new connectors in Cost Management to prepare for the expiration date. To access AWS costs, we recommend looking at alternative solutions. For more information, see “Connector for AWS support in Cost Management ends on March 31, 2025.”
Pricing updates on Azure.com
We’ve been working hard to make some changes to the Azure pricing experience, and we’re excited to share them with you. These changes will help you more easily estimate the cost of your solution.
- Azure Savings Plans have now been extended to the Microsoft Azure Spring app, providing more flexibility and cost optimization on both the pricing page and calculator.
- Added calculator entry for Azure Kubernetes Services Edge Essentials.
- Pricing for many new offerings on Microsoft Azure, including Microsoft Azure Application Gateway (including general availability (GA) of Application Gateway for Containers) and the new Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines series (Dasv6, Easv6, and Fasv6 – all in preview) added. ), Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (add virtual machine (VM) families and improved search experience in the pricing calculator), Microsoft Azure SQL Database (HA replica pricing for elastic pools, Hyperscale), Microsoft Azure Databricks (“model for freemium”) “Education” workloads (tier workspaces), Microsoft Azure Managed Grafana (Standard and Essential plan types added to the pricing calculator), Microsoft Azure Backup (pricing for enhanced policy types), Microsoft Azure Private 5G Core (on both Pages and Pages) New proposals for RAN overflow and device overflow calculator).
We’re constantly working to improve our pricing tools and make them more accessible and user-friendly. We hope these changes help you estimate the cost of your Azure solutions. If you have any comments or suggestions for future improvements, please let us know!
Cost Management Lab
Cost Management Labs allows you to preview new features in Cost Management, engage directly with them, share feedback, and better understand how you use our services, so we can deliver a more tailored and optimized experience. Some of the features you’ll find in Cost Management Labs include:
A new way to save money in the Microsoft cloud
Here are some important updates to review to help you save money:
New videos and learning opportunities
Check out “Leveraging the Anomaly Management Process with Microsoft Cost Management” for a helpful video on anomaly and reservation management. Follow the Cost Management YouTube channel to stay up to date on new videos being released and let us know what you’d like to see next. Looking for a more guided experience? Start with “Control your Azure spending and manage your bills with Microsoft Cost Management.”
See the blog post. Combine FinOps best practices with Microsoft tools to streamline and optimize your workloads using Microsoft tools for FinOps best practices.
Document update
Here are some documentation updates you might be interested in:
Want to keep up with all article updates? View changes to Cost Management and billing documents.Azure DocumentsRepository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select ‘Edit’.”Submit a quick pull request at the top of the article. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!
What are your future plans?
These are just a few of the larger updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out our previous Cost Management updates. We’re always listening to you and we’re constantly improving based on your feedback, so please continue to send us your feedback.
best wishes,
Cost Management Team
