Optimize your Azure costs
Manage your cloud spending and focus on what matters most to your business
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Find out about the tools, offers, and guidance designed to help you manage and optimize your Azure costs. Learn how to understand and forecast your bill, optimize workload costs, and control your spending.
7 ways to optimize your Azure 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 underutilized 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 percent over pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure services when you prepay 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
Get Azure dev/test pricing for development environments
Take advantage of significant rate discounts for your ongoing development and testing—and avoid paying Microsoft software charges on your VMs.
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 organization’s cloud spending—with Azure Cost Management.
7
Explore serverless technologies and new architectures
Optimize your workloads with guidance for building apps and solutions on Azure using best practices and proven patterns.
Explore tools and resources to help you save
Find tools, programs, and best practices to help forecast your cloud-computing costs, optimize your workloads, and control your spending.
Understand and forecast your costs
- Monitor and analyze 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 optimize your workloads
- Follow your Azure Advisor best practice recommendations for cost savings.
- Review your workload architecture for cost optimization using the Azure Architecture Review and the Azure Architecture Framework design guidance.
- 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 with cloud governance
- 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.
Cost optimization training
Gain practical skills for saving money on Azure in this free, 1 hour 14 minute Microsoft Learn module, Predict costs and optimize spending for Azure. You’ll learn how to:
- Choose from the different options to purchase Azure services
- Estimate costs using the Azure pricing calculator
- Predict and optimize your cloud costs with Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor
- Use proven best practices for saving on licensing and infrastructure costs