Microsoft Cost Management helps you better understand where your costs are coming from in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize your costs to do more with less. We are always looking to better understand these challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you with your efforts.
Whether you are a fresh graduate, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and need to know how much you are spending, where it is going, and how to plan for the future. No one wants a surprise bill, and that’s where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.
We’re always learning more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you 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. Here are some of the latest improvements and updates:
Before we dive into the details, let me give a shout-out to the FinOps Foundation for successfully hosting FinOps X 2024 in San Diego, California last month. Microsoft was a Platinum Sponsor for the second year in a row. Our team enjoyed engaging with customers and gaining insights into their FinOps practices. We also shared our vision of simplifying FinOps with AI, as demonstrated in this short video. Transform your FinOps practice into the AI era.
For all updates on FinOps X 2024, see this blog post by my colleague Michael Flanakin, who serves on the FinOps Technical Advisory Board.
FOCUS 1.0 Export Support
As you may know, the FinOps Foundation announced the general availability of version 1 of the FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) in June 2024. We are excited to announce that you can now get the newly released version via the Microsoft Azure Portal or through the export experience in: REST API. You can review the updated schema and the differences from previous versions in this Microsoft Learn article. We will continue to support the ability to export a preview version of the FOCUS dataset.
Please refer to the documentation for more information on all datasets supported via the export feature and their features.
Cost Card in Azure Portal
The ability to estimate Azure service costs using the pricing calculator has always been available, enabling you to better plan your costs. We are excited to announce the ability to now estimate within the Azure portal itself. Engineers can now quickly get detailed information about estimated virtual machine (VM) costs before deploying, and make adjustments as needed. This new experience is currently available only for VMs running on Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions, with plans to expand in the future. By providing engineers with cost data without disrupting their workflow, you can make the right decisions and be accountable for managing your spend.
Kubernetes Cost View (New Entry Point)
I talked about Azure Kubernetes Service cost views in a November 2023 blog post. We know how important it is to have visibility into the detailed costs of running your clusters. To make these cost views easier to access, we’ve added an entry point to the cluster page itself. Engineers and administrators who are already on the cluster page and making configuration changes or monitoring clusters can now quickly reference costs.
Pricing updates for 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 solutions.
- We’ve expanded our global footprint with pricing support for new Azure regions, including Central Spain and Central Mexico.
- Azure AI has received significant updates, including pricing support for basic video indexing analytics in Azure AI Video Indexer, new GPT-4o models and improved fine-tuned models in Azure OpenAI services, removal of S2-S4 volume discount tiers for Azure AI Translator, and introduction of standard high-speed transcription and video dubbing in preview for Azure AI Speech.
- We have comprehensively updated our pricing model to reflect the latest offerings and provide you with the most accurate information. This includes:
We are constantly working to improve our pricing tools and make them more accessible and user-friendly. We hope these changes will help you estimate the cost of your Azure solutions. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future improvements, please let us know!
New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud
Documentation Updates
Here are some documentation updates that you might be interested in:
Want to keep up with all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change log.azure-documentationRepositories on GitHub. Select if you are missing something.EditPlease type at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. All contributions are welcome and appreciated!
What’s next?
These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out our previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We’re always listening to your feedback and continually improving based on your feedback, so please keep sending us your feedback.
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