Effective cost management best practices in Azure public cloud computing:

Introduction: This article is a continuation in the series of articles on Azure services, some of which can be referenced as follows: 1)  Azure Gateway service, 2) SignalR service 3)  Bing API, 4) Azure Pipeline, 5) Host Integration Server (HIS), 6) Azure Healthcare API and Azure Custom Resource Provider. While the service portfolio for Azure grows in size, SKU, and number, Cloud architects are limited in utilizing the full potential of the Azure Public Cloud due to perceptions around cost and the poor appreciation and use of the cost management features. This article is not prescribing in any manner, but it highlights gap between the business perceptions of the cloud and the potential for use of the cloud features by architects.

Description: Any literature on public cloud computing and its billing will extol the pay-as-you-go model of cloud computing resources, its elasticity to workloads and savings for off-peak use, it's granular and illustrative pricing, and costs, the ability to impose limits and rates, the one-stop-shop for cost management dashboard and a few others. Both the business unit managers and the cloud architects are savvy about when to use the cloud. For example, starting up a new venture or business is easier with the cloud while established multi-tenant software-as-a-service offerings prefer hybrid cloud computing, if not private datacenters. The cost of a commodity physical desktop might appear lower but the total cost of ownership of the corresponding virtual machine in the cloud is in fact the lower of the two. There are several benefits and corresponding savings from a virtual machine that does not reflect in the comparison between the outright purchase of a desktop for less than five hundred dollars and the flat rate of ninety-three dollars per month for a corresponding virtual machine. Even when a TCO calculator is available from the cloud for a given public cloud resource, its usage and acceptance are hardly exercised to a full study. Organizations and big company departments are averse to their employees increasing their cloud budget to anything beyond a thousand dollars a month when their travel expenses and employee training alone exceed that by ten times. This is not the only gap. Business owners cite those existing channels of supply and demand are becoming savvy in their competition with the cloud while the architects do not truly enforce the right practice to keep the overall budget of cloud computing expenses to be kept under a limit. Employees and resource users are indeed being secured by role-based access control but the privilege to manage subscriptions granted to those users allows them to disproportionately escalate costs. Architects on the other hand complain that such costs are artificially and unnecessarily estimated when the trend is easy to observe and reactionary actions to restrict costs are easy to take. Let us look at some of the best practices available from the public cloud for all parties involved.