Optimise your Azure costs
Manage your cloud spending and focus on what matters most to your business
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
- Monitor and analyse your Azure bill with Azure Cost Management and Billing. Set budgets and allocate spending to your teams and projects.
- Estimate the costs for your next Azure projects using the Azure pricing calculator and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator.
Cost optimise your workloads
- Follow your Azure Advisor best practice recommendations for cost savings.
- Review your workload architecture for cost optimisation using the Microsoft Azure Well-architected Review assessment and the Microsoft Azure Well-architected Framework design documentation.
- Save with Azure offers and licensing terms such as the Azure Hybrid Benefit, paying in advance for predictable workloads with reservations, Azure Spot Virtual Machines and Azure dev/test pricing.
Control your costs
- Mitigate cloud spending risks by implementing cost management governance best practices at your company using the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.
- Implement cost controls and guardrails for your environment with Azure Policy.
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.
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.