Chapter 5: Planning for Cost Savings – Cleanup

Now that we've learned how to analyze, process, and implement right-sizing techniques, the next part of the cost-saving section is dedicated to cleaning up. This means having full control of your cloud infrastructure and being able to access, quarantine, and delete unused resources where possible.

In this chapter, we will find and remove services and configurations that are deemed unnecessary, either manually or via automation. We will also recognize all the resources that were used temporarily for migration and may have been forgotten. We'll also learn how to analyze cost spikes that may be the result of unattached resources, shared resources, and even unused subscriptions, along with their security implications.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Cleaning up the cloud resources
• Byproducts of migrating to Azure
• Identifying cost spikes

By completing this chapter, you will...

Technical requirements

For this chapter, you'll need the following:

• A computer with internet connectivity.
• Access to the Azure portal.
• Privileges to access Cost Management information (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/costs/assign-access-acm-data).
• To execute cost report scripts, you'll need a host with at least PHP 7.4 and a MySQL or MariaDB database. It's also mandatory to have the initialized and imported billing data from Chapter 3, Monitoring Costs.

You can find the code for this chapter here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/The-Road-to-Azure-Cost-Governance/tree/main/Chapter%205.

Cleaning up the cloud resources

Another important part of cloud cost saving is the cleanup operation. When dealing with a large number of workloads or complex projects, lots of resources are created just as a transitional step and are often forgotten about and paid for. In this section, we'll learn how to identify and clean up all the unused and unattached resources in your virtual data center.

Cleaning up unused items, as a first approach, represents one of the short-term, quick-win techniques for cost-saving. But, on the other hand, if they're inserted into a recurring process, this will help you uncover any unassigned or unutilized infrastructure (with operational downfalls) and, in general, uncover the gaps in your operational processes that might need extra effort and have a wider impact than costs. In addition, you should plan to periodically assess the evolution of your infrastructure for any ghost resources that may have been left unassigned and unused.

Free...

Byproducts of migrating to Azure

When you approach a large resource migration project (for example, from an on-premises data center) or an application upgrade, it's normal to have resource duplication, parallel environments, large database backups, or dumps around your infrastructure.

Azure Migrate and Azure Site Recovery

When you have to migrate applications and services to Azure, there are great tools that can help you define your landing resources sizes and tiers.

Azure Migrate is a hub that lets you discover, assess, and migrate your on-premises applications, providing you with insights into how your application will perform in the cloud, as well as the associated costs. It includes several integrated tools and even allows for additional third-party/ISV integrations. For our cleanup section, we will look at Dependency Analysis, which can be very useful for understanding if you can get rid of resources that are unused or under-utilized without impacting other applications...

Identifying cost spikes

As we learned in Chapter 1, Understanding Cloud Bills, and Chapter 3, Monitoring Costs, at this stage, you should be familiar with all the tools that allow you to get a full picture of your spending and keep it predictable and under budget. Sometimes, however, there are specific conditions that will create unexpected spikes in your costs and will call for a prompt cleanup action. My recommendation is to check the Azure Cost Management page daily and look at a daily stacked view of your spending. The following screenshot shows the cost management page:

Figure 5.7 – Example of a daily stacked chart on your cost management page

In normal operations, you should be able to identify a nice clean pattern (just as the one pictured in the previous example) and immediately spot any spikes that do not resemble your normal pattern of operations.

Spikes can be caused by many underlying issues:

• An application that is calling a service...

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the rest of the cost-saving techniques that you can use to both lower and keep your Azure costs down – we learned how to deal with cloud resources with the correct mindset.

Then, we learned what resources and workloads can be cleaned up and how to save money, from shared resources to networking resources consumption, down to proliferating unused or forgotten subscriptions. With the knowledge you've gained in this chapter, we hope that you are aware of all the possible hidden resources and costs of a normal operational virtual data center.

The next chapter is dedicated to reservations since they represent the quickest cost-saving technique. Even though, in complex environments, reservations may seem elaborate and difficult to deal with, we have now tackled everything we needed to properly address them: from right-sizing our resources to cleaning up unused services. Hence, we are now ready to dive into reservations with the correct...

Questions

1. How do you know if you have unattached disks in your environment?
2. How can you calculate the peering traffic of an application that shares a VNet?
3. How can you delete an unused subscription?
4. How can you get the costs of resources involved in a software migration project?
5. How can you split the costs of a shared resource?

Further reading

• Migration best practices for costs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/migrate/azure-best-practices/migrate-best-practices-costs
• Unexpected charges: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/understand/analyze-unexpected-charges