Welcome to this video, Azure Cost Management
Setup, Organization and
Tagging - Part A: Setting up
for Success - my name is
Terry Clancy
Azure Cost Management is a native Azure service,
designed to allow customers and partners
to gain complete visibility and control
of their Cloud spend across Azure
and Amazon Web Services. This is the first part
of a 4 part video series
which covers setting up Azure environments hierarchies,
RBAC access and required
settings, and reporting by dimensions and
tags. In this video we will cover setting up
your Azure environment to best support
Azure Systems generally and Azure
Cost Management specifically. The Cloud Adoption
Framework is the recommended approach
to guide cloud adoption in Azure.
It consolidates and shares best practices from
Microsoft employees, partners, and customers.
The framework gives customers a set of
tools, guidance, and assets
that help shape technology, business, and people management strategies.
Those that are most relevant to
cost management are shown here in yellow.
Cost Management should be a consideration
across the entire Cloud Adoption Framework
lifecycle.
When setting up Azure the recommended
approach is to navigate to the Quick Start Center
(which you can find by searching for
Quick Start)
Once there, you can use the many tools available
But the place to start is with the Azure Setup
guide. As you can see here this provides step
by step guidance and helpful links and covers:
The organization of resources into hierarchies
Management of access to your Azure environment
with role-based access controls or RBAC.
Guidance on Managing costs, guidance on
Governance, security, and compliance in Azure.
Guidance on monitoring and reporting
And resources for staying current with Azure
And up to date with changes in the Azure
platform. From the very beginning of the lifecycle,
solutions should be architected to minimize
costs and to facilitate easier
cost management. For example, maybe your business would benefit from
selecting more Platform as a Service or PAAS services
rather than Infrastructure as a Service
or IAAS services such as VMs,
as this might reduce cost, because you only pay for what you use when you are using it,
and there is less need to shut down services when not in use.
Architecting solutions in a modular manner that align with organization and
Cost Center boundaries can also help
in cost management and justifying and securing
funding. Before you move from
architecture to implementation it is important to define
your corporate naming conventions. Well-defined naming
and metadata tagging conventions help
IT staff quickly find and manage resources.
Well-defined names and tags can
also help to align cloud usage
costs with business teams. Naming Standards should be
be defined very early in the lifecycle to
avoid non-compliant names from
the start. Lets look at how Tags
can be used for cost Management. Azure Tags allow you to add metadata to
resources and to resource groups
to help you logically organize them into
multiple taxonomies. They are important for
cost management because they allow multiple
categorizations of resources
so you can look at resource costs
from differnt perspectives. Simply put,
a Tag is a name, value pair. For example,
if you define a custom tag with the name
sometimes called a key, such as "Environment"
then that tag can have different or identical
values on different resources.
For example, on five different resources it might have values like
"Dev", "Test", "Eng"
or "Sales. What tags you use depends on your
business and technical requirements.
There is a maximum of 50 tags per resource
so don't go crazy and we suggest you leave room for later additions.
We do suggest to always
tag resources with owner,
cost center and department. On the right-hand side of
this slide, you can see some other examples
of tags that are commonly used.
Note that if you are using
ACM with Amazon Web Services or AWS,
you can still use tags, but you need to create and
apply the tags to your resources within
AWS.
Tags are only really useful if they can be used
comprehensively and consistently
across the organization. Otherwise you will see a lot of
untagged resources as you can see here in gray
So, once the standard is set then Azure
users should enforce the correct use of
tags with Azure Policy. Azure Policy helps you manage and prevent
IT issues
with policy definitions that enforce rules and effects for your resources,
so those resources stay compliant with your
corporate standards and service level agreements.
Azure Policy evaluates your resources for non-compliance
with assigned policies.
For example, you can have a policy to allow certain
SKU size of virtual machines in your environment.
Once this policy is implemented, new and existing resources are evaluated for
compliance.In relation to Cost Management,
there are existing policies in Azure that you can use to
Enforce Tags with Values on Resource
Groups. Apply a tag and it's value
to a Resource. Or enforce a tag
and it's value. There is also a policy available on
GitHub which simulates Inheritance of
Tags from Resource Group to Resources with a copy
You should also consider bundling multiple
policies into Tagging "Initiatives"
and deploying them. That way you can
update the Initiative with any changes.
An Azure Initiative definition
is a collection of policy definitions
that are tailored towards achieving a singular overarching goal.
Initiative definitions simplify managing
and assigning policy definitions.
They simplify by grouping a set of
of policies as one single item. For example,
this Billing tags policy initiative
sample, includes a set of policies
which require specified tag values
for cost center and product name. It uses
built-in policies to apply and enforce required
tags while allowing you to
specify the required values for the tags.
To further standardize and streamline the creation and deployment of new environments
that adhere to corporate standards consider using
Azure Blueprints. Azure Blueprints.
can help you go one step further to standardizing deployments
with the knowledge you're building within organizational
compliance, and at the same time speed up
development and delivery. This benefits deployments
generally, but is particularly important to ensure
that cost analysis is manageable
and accurate. Blueprints are
a declarative way to encapsulate, deploy and
update cloud environments in a repeatable manner
using composable artifacts such as: Role Assignments,
Policy Assignments, Azure Resource Manager
templates and Resource Groups. Unlike ARM Templates,
with Blueprints, the relationship between the blueprint
definition (what should be deployed)
and the blueprint assignment (what was deployed)
is preserved. This connection supports improved
tracking and auditing of deployments. With Blueprints
you can also upgrade several subscriptions at once
that are governed by the same blueprint.
This brings me to the end of Azure Cost Management,
Setup, Organization and Tagging, Part A - Setting up for Success.
All the best with Azure Cost Management.