Real-world examples demonstrate how forgotten resources and unoptimized architectures can lead to massive, unexpected cloud bills.
The Azure Well-Architected Framework provides five pillars of excellence, including a dedicated pillar for cost optimization to guide your cloud strategy.
Implement cost management disciplines by creating cost models, enforcing accountability, and designing for efficiency through usage and rate optimization.
Cost optimization is about being frugal, not cheap, requiring a balance with other critical pillars like reliability, security, and performance.
Design resilient and scalable systems by implementing patterns like queue-based load leveling, competing consumers, and the claim check pattern.
Prevent cost overruns by implementing a mandatory tagging strategy for accountability and using Azure Policy to automate enforcement of cost-saving rules.
Significantly lower your compute bill by upgrading to newer VM generations for better performance-to-price ratios and choosing lower-cost Azure regions.
Commit to reservations for predictable workloads to achieve deep discounts and reduce monitoring costs by fine-tuning diagnostic settings in Log Analytics.
Match infrastructure to actual demand by using consumption-based plans for sporadic workloads and carefully calculating resource requirements for AKS node pools.
Diagnose and fix common AKS autoscaler issues, such as failure to scale down, and leverage modern tools like Karpenter and KEDA for smarter scaling.
Reduce expenses for non-compute services by using smart blob tiering for storage and private endpoints to avoid costly NAT gateway egress traffic.
Make cost optimization a core part of your organization's DNA by establishing regular review meetings and continuously evaluating your architecture and spending.
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.