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Optimise your Azure costs

Manage your cloud spending and focus on what matters most to your business

Take cost optimisation training

Explore tools and resources to help you save

Find out about the tools, offers and guidance designed to help you manage and optimise your Azure costs. Learn how to understand and forecast your bill, optimise workload costs and control your spending.

Understand and forecast your costs

Cost optimise your workloads

Control your costs

Seven ways to optimise costs today

1

Shut down unused resources

Identify idle virtual machines (VMs), ExpressRoute circuits and other resources with Azure Advisor. Get recommendations on which resources to shut down, and see how much you would save.

2

Right-size underused resources

Find underutilised resources with Azure Advisor – and get recommendations on how to reduce your spend by reconfiguring or consolidating them.

3

Reserve instances for consistent workloads

Get a discount of up to 72 per cent over pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure services when you pre-pay for a one- or three-year term with reservation pricing.

4

Take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit

AWS is five times more expensive than Azure for Windows and SQL Server. Save big when you migrate your on-premises workloads to Azure.

5

Configure autoscaling

Save by dynamically allocating and de-allocating resources to match your performance needs.

6

Set up budgets and allocate costs to teams and projects

Create and manage budgets for the Azure services you use or subscribe to – and monitor your organisation’s cloud spending – with Azure Cost Management.

7

Choose the right Azure compute service

Azure offers many ways to host your code. Operate more cost efficiently by selecting the right compute service for your application.

Learn more about these seven highly effective ways to optimise your Azure costs

Take a look at this infographic that shows how to take advantage of the free tools included with your Azure subscription. Find special licensing offers and other ways to assess and adjust your Azure workloads for optimal cost efficiency.

Cost optimisation training

Learn how to save money on Azure in this free, 51-minute Microsoft Learn module, Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework – Cost Optimisation. You’ll learn how to:

  • Gain visibility and draw cost insights using monitoring and analytics.
  • Maximise the efficiency of your cloud environment.
  • Provision resources that are optimised for cost.
Start learning

Additional cost optimisation resources

Get help with managing your costs from expert partners

Find help with cost management from an Azure partner with verified capabilities – and move forward confidently, knowing that your partner is committed to your success. Depending on your needs, there are two expert partner options to choose from:

Azure advanced specialisation partners provide deep expertise in specific scenarios – such as infrastructure migration, app modernisation, cloud-native app development or managing specialised workloads on Azure.

Azure expert managed service providers are generalists, offering validated expertise in managing and optimising Azure environments, following industry and Microsoft best practices.

Find a partner