Five keys to cutting costs and boosting performance on Azure

Microsoft Azure is a powerful and robust cloud platform with the potential to dramatically reduce your infrastructure costs, deliver faster development and innovation lifecycles, and increase your talent efficiency. Yet, if your workloads and processes aren’t designed for high performance and cost optimization, you could end up missing out on these benefits. Worse, you could end up overspending in the cloud by up to 70%.

From cloud sprawl and difficult-to-understand cloud pricing models, to failing to right-size your environment or keep pace with Azure innovation — you face many challenges on your journey to optimization. But with the right help and some best practices, you can get the most from your Azure cloud.

1. Improve transparency with the right reporting tools

Start by getting to know the sources and structure behind your monthly bills. Azure Cost Management + Billing gives you free tools to monitor and analyze cloud spend, set budget and spending alerts, and allocate cloud costs across teams. To level up your optimization through deeper analysis, Rackspace Technology recommends CloudHealth by VMware. This best-in-class platform helps you view and track your expenses while offering recommendations and solutions to improve cost management.

2. Keep an eye on your cost trends

As you adopt cloud technologies and monitor their costs over time, you’ll see cost trends start to emerge. Being aware of such patterns beforehand can help you avoid long-term cost consequences. It’s important not only to scrutinize your trends but investigate and understand the causes. Azure Advisor can help you optimize cloud resource utilization with personalized recommendations.

3. Simplify costs and governance with accounts and tags

Be sure to take advantage of Azure’s resource tagging capabilities. By delineating your costs by applications, owners, environments and other dimensions, you’ll gain visibility into how you’re spending. Determining when to use account separation and how to apply an effective (and enforceable) tagging strategy is key.

4. Match consumption with demand

The flexibility and scalability of the cloud allows you to provision resources closely in line with your downstream needs. When right-sizing your resources to match demand, it is important to consider horizontal and vertical over-scaling as well as run-time on unused or old resources. By tracking your utilization and turning off old instances, you can save significantly on costs incurred from wasted resources. The CloudHealth platform provides automated tools to identify waste and encourage saving.

5. Tap into expertise and analytics for your Azure environment

Instead of reallocating your valuable technology resources to budget analysis, you can seek third-party expertise that focuses on all of the moving parts of technology cost management. Rackspace Technology offers a comprehensive solution with support and expert guidance that will keep your Azure workloads running at peak performance, while optimizing your cost savings.

Our Optimizer+ Service Block for Azure enables you to save money, improve performance and supplement your IT staff with access to a deep pool of Azure expertise. With continuous cost and performance optimization, you know that not only is your financial investment being spent wisely, but that you’re also getting peak performance from your Azure workloads. And with 24x7x365 access to Azure experts, you know you’ll be ready for whatever this changing market throws at you next.