{"id":369,"date":"2020-12-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-15T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-06-30T10:43:40","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T17:43:40","slug":"azure-cost-management-and-billing-2020-year-in-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/azure-cost-management-and-billing-2020-year-in-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Azure Cost Management and Billing 2020 year in review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

2020 has been an interesting year. Many of us started the year, excited about the opportunities that come with a new year. None of us predicted a global pandemic fundamentally changing how we live and work together or separately, as the case may be. And with this new normal reducing capacity in so many ways, managing and reducing cost has become even more critical than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s look at some of what you saw in the last year and what’s coming in the next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Streamlined management behind a single pane of glass<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

2019 laid the foundation for Azure Cost Management and Billing<\/a> across Enterprise Agreement (EA), Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG), Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) accounts as well as preview support for managing AWS and Azure costs together, behind a single pane of glass in the Azure portal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the global shift in priorities in 2020, we refocused on further solidifying this foundation by expanding support for existing capabilities, like scheduled exports for MCA<\/a> in January, the inclusion of reservation and Marketplace purchases in budgets<\/a> in April and amortized costs in exports<\/a> in August, and programmatic subscription creation for Azure Government<\/a> in June. We focused a lot on making the platform more secure, reliable, and performant, including additional compliance efforts, like FedRAMP High<\/a> in April. We also addressed gaps based on your feedback, like support for custom role-based access control (RBAC) roles for management groups<\/a> in January and creating subscriptions in Azure Resource Manager (ARM) deployment templates<\/a> in October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You also saw invoicing improvements for PAYG<\/a> in March and MCA<\/a> in May. The MCA changes are especially interesting because they enabled organizations to group subscriptions into separate invoices, which has been a common ask for enterprises using EA today. Of course, this is just one of the benefits of MCA accounts over classic EA, PAYG, and CSP accounts. Many of you may already be discussing your transition to MCA, but if not, talk to your partner or Microsoft representative to learn more about MCA and an Azure plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lastly, the year wouldn’t be complete without covering our cross-cloud offering: Azure Cost Management connectors for AWS is now generally available<\/a>, as of September, and ready for you to start managing costs across Azure and AWS today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>What’s next?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Throughout 2021, you’ll continue to see the platform evolve and grow, especially around reliability and performance. New capabilities will be prioritized for MCA and, in some cases, may not be available to classic accounts. As an example, usage data can currently take 8-24 hours to become available within Azure Cost Management, but we’re working with every team across Azure to get cost to you within a few hours. You’ll see this become available for MCA first. Support for Sponsorship will also be made available via MCA instead of classic Sponsorship subscriptions you may have today. Similarly, we encourage all organizations using classic CSP to transition to an Azure plan to gain visibility into and optimize costs. This is already available to CSP providers today. Instead of adding direct support for classic CSP subscriptions not on an Azure plan, we’ll take this time to expand MCA capabilities, like adding support for management groups. At the same time, you will also continue to see improvements in classic accounts, like PAYG support in Azure Government and more coverage of EA portal and Account portal capabilities within the Azure portal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to account and cost management behind a single pane of glass, the key theme for 2021 is modernization and transition to MCA. This transition is already underway for a lot of organizations and will continue throughout 2021. While organizations using classic EA and CSP accounts will drive the timing for this transition, it will be automatic and seamless for classic PAYG and Sponsorship accounts. Please talk to your partner or Microsoft representative to learn more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rich cost reporting and analytics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The year brought new and updated cost views both within and outside the Azure portal, starting with new Microsoft Power BI reports for reservations and Azure Hybrid Benefit<\/a> and more details in the Cost by Resource view<\/a> in February, followed by usability improvements, like more clarity behind empty cost and usage attributes<\/a> in February and the ability to filter based on empty attributes and untagged resources<\/a> in July. As we bring the year to a close, you also saw a preview for new views optimized for resources and reservations<\/a> in November. This preview is exciting because it introduces a new, more flexible, more performant framework for cost reporting and analytics within the Azure portal. We’ll talk more about that later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You also saw advanced scheduling options for exports<\/a> in August, including support for amortized costs, which we talked about earlier, and a new API to get PAYG rates for all Azure products and services<\/a> in September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>What’s next?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We mentioned the new framework for cost reporting and analytics. This will be the foundation for many new experiences within the Azure portal\u2014from new views with improved tables and charting to integrated insights and scheduling email notifications of your saved views. You’ll also see API improvements, like better handling for large datasets and a new pricing API that includes both PAYG and discount prices for your billing account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flexible cost control that puts the power in your hands<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Driving organizational accountability can be a challenge. It all starts with centralizing your costs and aligning them to the organizational or financial hierarchy. This can be especially difficult when you have shared services being used by multiple teams and projects. The cost allocation preview<\/a> in September is the first big step to help you break down these shared costs, enabling each team to report on and monitor their total cost, including these shared services, which they historically haven’t had visibility into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once you have costs broken down and reported back to the teams incurring them, you’ll want to identify and stop bad spending patterns to keep costs under control. You already know you can define budgets to get notified about and take action on overages. You decide what actions you want to take, whether that be as simple as an email notification or as drastic as deleting all your resources to ensure you won’t be charged. 2020 improved on this by including reservation and Marketplace purchases in budgets<\/a> in April, giving you a more complete picture of your costs, enabling you to customize budget start month and set thresholds over 100 percent<\/a> in June, for finer control of what actions to take and when, and allowing you to customize the budget alert language<\/a> in November, to reach an even broader audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>What’s next?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Earlier, we mentioned continued platform improvements around performance and reliability. You’ll also see this extend into budgets with dramatically improved notification times, with an ultimate goal of alerting you within two hours of either going over or being forecasted to go over your budget. As mentioned above, this will start with MCA accounts. We’re also looking at improvements around management groups and tags to give you more flexibility to manage costs the way you need to for your organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

New ways to save and do more with less<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cloud computing comes with a lot of promises, from flexibility and speed to scalability and security. The promise of cost savings is often the driving force behind cloud migrations, yet is also one of the more elusive to achieve. Luckily, Azure delivers new cost optimization opportunities nearly every month. This is on top of the recommendations offered by Azure Advisor, which are specifically tuned to save money on the resources you already have deployed. 2020 was loaded with cost optimization opportunities \u2013 more than double what you saw in 2019 \u2013 from new and reduced pricing to expanded support of current cost-saving options to new recommendations and more. Here are some of the services you saw new cost saving opportunities for in 2020:<\/p>\n\n\n\n