Cloud Cost Optimization | Microsoft Azure

Explore tools and resources to help you save

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.

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 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.

7 ways to optimize 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

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 organization’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 optimization training

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

Gain visibility and draw cost insights using monitoring and analytics.
Maximize the efficiency of your cloud environment.
Provision resources that are optimized for cost.

Start learning

Optimize your Azure costs