>> Good news. We have another episode in
the Azure Enablement show in the well-architected series.
In this episode, we're going to be talking to Dante
about getting started with cost optimization.
How to look at we're,
and how to optimize your Azure spent.
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Welcome to the Azure Enablement show where we'll be discussing
the challenges you and
our other tech savvy customers have encountered.
Together, we'll be talking with experts
to find out how they think about these problems,
recommended tools and best practices and tips they
have learned from years of experience that you can use.
Today, we're going to be talking a bit about cost optimization.
To bring you into the scene, what I'm going to do is,
I'm going to portray just your average customer.
Somebody who works at Tailwind Traders,
a hardware company, and I've got a problem.
Today, I want to talk to my friend Dante,
who is an expert in cost optimization because I need some help.
Dante, here's the deal.
I just had my CFO walk into my office
brandishing our Azure bill and asking me what's going on,
and what can we do about it?
Can you help me? How can I deal with this?
>> Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Happy to help, David.
This is not uncommon. Don't be alarmed.
This is something that we're here to help
with and we've got some guidance that I think can help you.
I guess first of all, what I'd love to find out from you
is where you're at and where you're struggling,
and what are you having some trouble with?
What's your CFO hoping to do?
>> I think she's concerned about the amount we're spending,
whether we're getting the value for
that amount of money and also looking
at our budget coming up for
this year and whether we're spending it wisely.
>> Yeah. Very common issue.
I think just to get you
started and I think to give you the lay of the land,
I want to show you something,
these few different stages that help you think about
cost optimization and the things you might
want to do at different stages of your Azure journey.
First up, there's this stage which is the design stage,
and that's right at the beginning when
you're developing a new workload, conceptualizing it,
determining what are your business requirements,
what can it costs?
What are your requirements along
the lines of reliability and performance?
What business value do you need to deliver for you?
That's the early stage of design.
Of course, there's things you can do at that stage right at
the beginning that are best practices
that will help you ensure
that your cost efficient all the way through.
Next up, there's this step of
provisioning which is where you're actually you're
going to the different building blocks
and picking them out and setting them up,
so that you build your workload.
This is where you start to actually build it out.
Then once it's running in the Cloud,
there's this step of monitoring,
which is where you want to keep tabs on how it's being used,
what you're spending, and
just constantly reviewing internally with
the right stakeholders to make sure that everything's
happening that you want to be happening
with this particular workload.
Then lastly, there's this step of optimization,
which I think is one that people think about most
frequently when they think about the topic of cost optimization,
but you'll see it only comes at the
end because there's a lot of things you
can do up front to help you along the way.
I'm sure you are still in a good position at the end,
but this step is really about what are the things you can do now
that it's running to make it run more cost efficiently.
Make sure that it's appropriately
sized and delivering on business value,
but at the right level for you.
Is that makes sense, those different stages?
>> Yeah. It totally does. I think just
because we're talking about an existing workload that I have,
I want to be like everybody else.
I want to start at the end
even the other ones look really cool too.
Let's talk a little about monitoring,
or even start with optimizing
where we think is a good place to start.
>> Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That sounds good.
There's a lot of things you can learn from
doing that with your existing workloads,
or maybe you've made some mistakes that then you can bring
back into earlier stages of design and development too.
There's one thing else I'd like to show you as well,
that I think is going to help you.
There's a lot that you can do, of course,
that are really impactful things
along the lines of monitoring and
optimizing your existing workloads.
We've got a bunch of guidance that I'll definitely be
sure to share with you that you can go more into depth,
but just the high level it.
These are some high-impact techniques
that you really need to know up front.
You'll see that a lot of the different tactics that you end
up implementing fall into these different buckets.
First of all, there's this important idea of increasing
cost awareness and visibility and accountability.
This is really about just getting
your arms around what are you spending?
Why are you spending it?
Who's spending it? All that stuff.
This is things like setting up budgets for your workloads,
assigned to your different teams,
setting up alerts against those budgets,
so that you're getting notified if
costs are getting out of control or approaching some limit.
Also tagging your resources,
so that you know whose resource this is,
who it belongs to, what it's for,
how important it is, all those kinds of things.
Are you doing any of those kinds of
things today with your workloads?
>> Yeah. I'm a little embarrassed to say,
we definitely doing some of the budget things.
I think we're also doing some of the tagging,
but not in any consistent way.
That's something I definitely have to work on.
>> Yeah. Absolutely. Well it's a great way to start.
This really falls into that monitoring phase, getting that right.
But it's often really foundational for the optimized phase,
which I imagine is the one that's going to ultimately
give your CFO what they're looking for there.
When we start to get into optimize,
the things that you're going to start to do,
especially around eliminating Cloud waste.
Because a lot of this is a little bit of a new habit for
people who might be used to on-prem
where some of these things are not necessarily as relevant.
There's these concepts of things
like shutting down unused resources.
It's very common for there to be Cloud sprawl and for there to
be dev environments that are running in
the background that you didn't realize were running all the
time or might be for a project that has expired and so on.
There's also the idea of right-sizing resources
to a really appropriate size because you're paying,
of course, exactly based on that size.
The closer you can fit your workload
sizes and your resource sizes
to the actual demand and usage you're seeing,
the better off you're going to be from a cost perspective.
Likewise, there's functionality that
Cloud provides around auto-scaling and
auto-shutdown that you can use to make
sure that you're being as efficient as possible,
which is often what this is about.
Does this make sense or these are
some things that you're looking at today?
>> Yeah. Totally. We've done a little bit of scaling.
I would say, like the previous answer,
were not consistent on all those things.
We're not doing any shutting down,
which is something I think we should look at.
>> Absolutely. Yeah. The other thing to point out about this is
that we carefully call it Cloud waste.
Unfortunately, for your CFO,
ultimately you are going to end up spending
some money on the Cloud,
but the key is avoiding waste.
You want to only spend what you need to spend.
In some cases, if it's a very important workload
and it's mission critical,
it's worth investing in it up to
the appropriate level of your business requirements.
That's why so much of this comes back to what do you need?
What do you need from a reliability,
a performance, all those kinds of perspectives?
That'll help you determine what you need to spend.
Is that makes sense?
>> Yeah. I've been following you.
>> Awesome. Great. Next up,
it's important to take advantage of all the different offers and
licensing advantages that Azure provides.
Two really big ones,
the Azure Hybrid Benefit,
which helps you extend
your on-premise investments already in
licensing around Windows Server and SQL Server.
Now also Linux subscriptions to Azure in some cases,
and you can see some really significant savings there.
That's a great one to take advantage of because of course,
I'm sure you, like many others,
have large on-prem investments already.
Then reservations is great because it allows you
to make a commitment over a longer period of time,
like a year or three years.
Then you save against the pay-as-you-go rate
for that service. Those are great things.
Often those are ones that you'll want to look at
in partnership with your central IT team,
because a lot of times
they're going to be the ones who manage those.
That could be a great one to bring to your CFO and
then also to bring to a central IT when you talk to them.
>> Okay.
>> Then lastly, this one's a little more challenging.
So I would put it last.
But if you're open to it,
it can be really important to take a look at your architecture for
your workloads and explore
these paths and server-less options that you have available,
because there can be situations where it really lowers a lot of
the total cost of ownership associated with a given workload,
because it avoids a lot of the management that you need
to do at the more IAAS level
when you're working with things like VMs.
It's a great thing to consider.
With any of these, what we're talking about now,
we have a lot of guidance that we can share with you to help make
those decisions a little bit more palatable.
Then you can approach the idea of modernizing and
moving to more of a Cloud-first design
for the cost-benefits there.
>> Cool. It seems to me like the next step is actually to dig
in to my situation and maybe do a little reading up before I do.
Do you know anybody that could help me
with that to look at my actual stuff?
>> Yeah. Absolutely. I have a great colleague,
very knowledgeable in these matters.
Her name is Tanuja and she would love to, I'm sure,
sit down with you and take a look at that bill
and and dive a little more deeply into these areas with you,
because we have a lot of tooling
and guidance and things like that that can assist you with that.
Then if you're interested,
there's some stuff you could actually read up on
beforehand that'll go a little bit more deeply into these areas.
Is that interesting to you?
>> Yeah. It sounds like the next step for me, Dante,
is to talk to somebody at Microsoft to get
a handle on what's actually going on in my situation.
Do you know anybody who could help me with that?
>> Yeah. Absolutely. I've got a colleague named
Tanuja and she's incredibly experienced,
an expert in all things cost optimization.
She can certainly help you and I'm sure she'd be very happy to
set up some time with you and
look into this stuff a little more deeply.
>> Cool. I look reasonable.
When I talk to her, would you be so kind just to send me an e-mail
with her contact and maybe some things I should get ahead of time?
>> Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll send you an e-mail right away and
I'll include some links in there to
a couple of resources like
the cost optimization part
of the Azure well-architected framework.
I think that would be particularly valuable to you.
You could take a look at the monitor guidance,
the optimized guidance, anything
else you want to check out and their too.
Then you'll be all ready to talk to Tanuja.
>> Cool. Well I think I'm going to be talking
to Tanuja in the next video.
Let me switch back to host mode.
Cool. Well, I want to thank you-all for joining me.
I hope that you'll join me in the next video.
We'll find out what happens to me when I go talk to Tanuja.
Thank you very much and look
forward to seeing you in the next video.
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