Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.
We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:
- Manage your MCA billing account across multiple tenants
- What’s new in Cost Management
- What is desktop as a service (DaaS) and how can it help your organization?
- Migrate and modernize with Azure to power innovation across the entire digital estate
- 5 steps to prepare developers for cloud modernization
- What’s new in Cost Management Labs
- New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud
- Documentation updates
- Join the Microsoft Cost Management team
Let’s dig into the details.
Manage your MCA billing account across multiple tenants
Many organizations have multiple Azure Active Directory tenants. They may have originated from mergers and acquisitions or were set up to separate environments for resources and applications. Regardless of the reason, you can now consolidate and manage all your Azure Active Directory tenants from a single Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) billing account.
To get started, configure associated tenants for your billing account from the Azure portal by navigating to Cost Management + Billing, then selecting Access control (IAM) in the menu, and selecting the Associated billing tenants command at the top of the screen.
Once the global admin for the tenant accepts the invitation, subscriptions can be moved to the billing account and you can provide users from that tenant access to your billing account, allowing them to perform activities like viewing and downloading invoices, monitoring cost, or creating subscriptions without having to switch tenants in the Azure portal, which has been common feedback we’ve heard about managing MCA billing accounts.
To learn more, see Manage billing across multiple tenants using associated billing tenants.
What’s new in Cost Management
The cloud runs at break-neck speed and staying informed can be tough. That’s the primary reason we keep delivering these monthly updates to make it a little easier for you to see what’s new in Microsoft Cost Management. For those who aren’t regularly checking the blog, you can now see some of the latest Cost Management updates directly in the portal on the Cost Management overview.
Just a small thing to help you keep up to date on the latest developments. Let us know what you’d like to see next.
What is desktop as a service (DaaS) and how can it help your organization?
Today’s workers want the freedom to respond to email and collaborate with colleagues from anywhere, on any device—whether they’re working at their kitchen table, at the airport waiting for their flight to board, or in the carpool line waiting for their kids to get out of school. The pandemic proved that remote teams could succeed, no matter where they worked and how far-flung they were.
Even so, many companies are still scrambling to accommodate the technological needs of their hybrid and remote workers. Desktop as a service, sometimes known by the acronym DaaS, can help.
Read the full article to learn about desktop as a service and how it can help you reduce costs.
Migrate and modernize with Azure to power innovation across the entire digital estate
Cloud adoption increased significantly during COVID-19 and continues for many companies. However, an enormous migration and modernization opportunity remains as organizations continue their digital transformation. In fact, 72 percent of organizations reported their industry’s pace of digital transformation accelerated because of COVID-19, according to a survey sponsored by Microsoft in The Economist.
And we don’t expect that to slow down anytime soon.
Read the full article to learn more about the key themes we’re seeing and new programs, capabilities, and opportunities to help along the way.
5 steps to prepare developers for cloud modernization
If you’re thinking about what it takes to modernize your applications, you’re not alone. Companies everywhere now understand that migrating applications to the cloud and shifting to a cloud-first approach is critical to business competitiveness. The purpose of modernizing applications is to better align them to current and future business needs. By deploying enterprise applications to the cloud, you gain greater ability to innovate, improve security, scale to meet demand, manage costs, and deliver rich and consistent customer experiences anywhere in the world more quickly.
Read the full article on the Azure blog.
What’s new in Cost Management Labs
With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what’s coming in Microsoft Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:
- Updated: What’s new in Cost Management – Now available in the public portal.
Learn about new announcements from the Cost Management overview. You can opt-in using Try Preview. - Updated: Cost savings insights in the cost analysis preview – Now enabled by default in Labs.
Identify potential savings available from Azure Advisor cost recommendations for your Azure subscription. You can opt-in using Try preview. - Forecast in the cost analysis preview.
Show your forecast cost for the period at the top of the cost analysis preview. You can opt-in using Try preview. - Product column experiment in the cost analysis preview.
We’re testing new columns in the Resources and Services views in the cost analysis preview for Microsoft Customer Agreement. You may see a single Product column instead of the Service, Tier, and Meter columns. Please leave feedback to let us know which you prefer. - Group related resources in the cost analysis preview.
Group related resources, like disks under virtual machines or web apps under App Service plans, by adding a “cm-resource-parent” tag to the child resources with a value of the parent resource ID. - Charts in the cost analysis preview.
View your daily or monthly cost over time in the cost analysis preview. You can opt-in using Try Preview. - View cost for your resources.
The cost for your resources is one click away from the resource overview in the preview portal. Just click View cost to quickly jump to the cost of that resource. - Change scope from the menu.
Change scope from the menu for quicker navigation. You can opt-in using Try Preview.
Of course, that’s not all. Every change in Microsoft Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it’s in the full Azure portal or Microsoft 365 admin center. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you’d like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today.
New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud
Lots of cost optimization improvements over the last month! Here are some of the generally available offers you might be interested in:
- US West 3 price reduction.
- Azure Public IPv6 offerings are free as of July 31, 2022.
- AKS node pool user start/stop feature.
- Reserved instance pricing for Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise.
- NVads A10 v5 virtual machines.
- Gateway Load Balancer.
- Microsoft Azure available from new cloud region in Qatar.
- Azure Log Analytics in China North 3 and China East 3.
- Application Insights in China North 3 and China East 3.
- Azure Stream Analytics in China East 3, China North 3, US DoD East, and US DoD Texas.
- Azure Databricks in West US 3.
And here are a couple new previews:
- AMD-based confidential VMs for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
- Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage.
- Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks.
- App Configuration geo replication support.
Documentation updates
Lots of updates based on your feedback with a few new docs you might be interested in:
- New: Calculate EA reservations cost savings.
- New: Manage billing across multiple tenants.
- New: Find tenant ID and primary domain.
- Plus 14 updates based on your feedback.
Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!
Join the Microsoft Cost Management team
Are you excited about helping customers and partners better manage and optimize costs? We’re looking for passionate, dedicated, and exceptional people to help build best-in-class cloud platforms and experiences to enable exactly that. If you have experience with big data infrastructure, reliable and scalable APIs, or rich and engaging user experiences, you’ll find no better challenge than serving every Microsoft customer and partner in one of the most critical areas for driving cloud success.
Watch the video below to learn more about the Microsoft Cost Management team:
What’s next?
These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We’re always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.
Follow @MSCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks. You can also share ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum.
We know these are trying times for everyone. Best wishes from the Microsoft Cost Management team. Stay safe and stay healthy.