 Hey everybody, join me in today's episode of Azure Unblogged, where I'm joined by Michael Flanagan from the Azure Cost Management Team. He's chatting to me about how customers use Azure Cost Management, and he's also sharing some tips on how to learn how to use Azure Cost Management and also how to keep up today with all the features and road map features that the team are working on, so stay tuned. Hey everybody, and welcome to today's Azure Unblogged episode with myself, Sarah. I'm joined by Michael who is a Program Manager with Azure Cost Management. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks, Sarah. I'm glad to be here. Awesome. Now when customers were a few years ago looking to migrate to the Cloud, they often got caught out with having to deal with cost management. Are we starting to see that trend change a little? Are customers more aware of the cost management piece that they now need to build into their strategy? Yeah, we really see the full spectrum. When I first joined the team, I was really surprised that how many large enterprises were struggling with that transition from on-prem to the Cloud, especially around cost management. Even those that had been using the Cloud for years were still struggling to find their footing. But over time, I realized that everyone's going through that same growth curve. Whether you're big or small, there's a mental model change that you need to make and how you need to approach Cloud-native solutions and understanding that and embracing that is critical for cost management. But we've definitely seen some major strides over the past few years. It's honestly been a little bit humbling to see how the community has grown and to have deeper, more engaged conversations about taking cost management to the next level with organizations of all sizes. Absolutely, there's definitely been some movement there and that's definitely great to see. So with the product Azure Cost Management, I've definitely seen growth over the last few years, how to implement it and use it myself for my own Azure subscriptions. Why do you think customers are embracing our product Azure Cost Management? What are the real benefits for them that we're seeing? Yeah. At its core, the main benefit that you get out of Azure Cost Management is optimizing what you spend. Whether you start by seeking to understand how you're being charged or you want to establish limits around what can be spent, the ultimate goal most people are looking for is really to just reduce those costs. There are a number of ways that you can achieve this. I always tell people that you need to start by understanding how the services you're using are built. Because knowing how you'll be charged is the first step to reducing those charges. The best place to do this is the Azure Pricing Calculator, which gives you a great breakdown of costs for every Azure service. You can also use cost analysis in the Azure portal to see a similar breakdown of your resource usage, for the resources you're already using. Then once you have a good understanding of what you're spending, you want to enforce some limits to stay within your financial constraints, whatever those may be, and budgets will help you with that by notifying you when you've exceeded any predefined thresholds. Or if you're looking to instill a hard limit, you can also use Action Groups to trigger custom scripts to shut down or even delete resources. That can help in a lot of ways. Of course, we also have advisor cost recommendations to identify areas where you may be underutilizing resources. Together, they all help you understand how you're being charged, stop excessive charges, and prevent unnecessary charges all in that effort to put more money back in your pocket and reduce what you're spending overall in the Cloud. What about trends? Are you seeing any features constantly lit up with our customers when they implement Azure Cost Management? What does your telemetry tell you about how they're using it? This goes back to the first question a little bit. Because the biggest trend that I've seen over the last year has probably been a general growth in the maturity of many organizations. Probably the two most notable things that I've noticed are, people are looking to break costs down for internal charge back, and also merge their cost data with other internal business data app usage metrics and any other internal systems that they may have. Seeing the maturity of organizations grow has been interesting. But I specifically want to call out charge back because a lot of organizations are really digging into cost allocation, which is a new feature that was released in September. Cost allocation allows you to split costs like shared network infrastructure and move the cost around within the organization to different subscriptions or resources, or even based on the usage of hags, to ensure that teams have full visibility into the cost that they're responsible for. Because at the end of the month, you're going to end up charging each of these organizations some section of that cost. They really need to see that throughout the month within the Azure portal, so that they know what's going to happen at the end of the month. Otherwise, there's a surprise, and then they come back and say, no, no, this is not right. This is not what I see. Cost allocation helps prevent some of those issues, and get everyone that more accurate picture of what they'll owe at the end of the month, directly from the Azure portal. You're talking about the organization working together there with the cost allocation piece. Is that the way people should be tackling cost management? It should be a team sport almost. It shouldn't just be something the IT department look after. What's your thoughts around that? Yeah, many people think about cost as a finance problem, but the truth is we spend more time talking to IT departments than finance teams. The question isn't really about finance versus IT, however, the bottom line is that everyone's responsible for cost, from leadership down to the individual project teams that are deploying the apps. It costs one of the most critical metrics in running your business in the cloud. It's right up there with security, availability, reliability and so on. Everyone should be talking about and keeping an eye on cost. And this is why many organizations are integrating cost data with other systems, which I talked about before, like using Power BI connector to build rich dashboards for leadership. And it was everyone to monitor costs, whether you're in the portal or not. What about learning how to use Azure cost management and also think about, you know, holistically cost management? What great resources do we have available to help people try and scale up on this? Yeah, the best place to start is definitely the Azure cost management and cost optimization learning path in Microsoft Learn. So I'd definitely say start there. Beyond that, we also have this monthly cost manager and billing blog post that comes out on the Azure blog. So I'd definitely say that you should also keep an eye out for those. They typically come out at the end of the month. And that gives you a bunch of new information about new and updated capabilities, early previews and new ways to save money with Azure in general. There's really something for everyone. So that's also something that I'd keep an eye out for. So that blog is something we should keep an eye out if we wanna see what's on the roadmap coming forward, is that right? Well, there's a lot to cover here. First, let me say that, let me go back to the monthly updates that I just talked about. In December, we published a blog post that summarized everything that we did in 2020 and also covered some of what's coming in 2021. There's a lot in there, so you should definitely check that out. I'm sure I'd miss something if I tried to cover it all. So let me just call out a couple of my personal favorites. The first isn't the most flashy, but we're focusing a lot on modernizing and involving the platform, especially around reliability and performance. There's a ton that goes into this, but one great example is an effort that we have to get cost and usage data into your hands and notify you about budget overages within two hours, which is a far cry from what it is today. So we're really excited to kind of get closer to that. And this is kind of a very long-term project that we've been working on. So seeing that come through for people throughout the year I think is gonna be exciting for them. We're also working on a new framework for cost reporting analytics and insights, which we announced in November. It's still very early days, but it's definitely stay tuned for in the coming months and you'll see many improvements in this space. And then in general, you'll continue to see the same level of investments around monitoring and optimizing costs as well as a lot of efforts to just make it easier to use and learn cost management and billing. Of course, this doesn't do it justice. There's a lot more. So please do read through that blog post and don't hesitate to ping me either on one of the blog posts or on Twitter. If you have any questions or you have any feedback, I'm always here. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today, Michael. That's been really insightful chatting to you. What we'll be doing is posting the links to the resources that Michael mentioned in the description box. So make sure you check that out and make sure you stay tuned for future episodes of Azure Unblogged.