Optimize 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 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.
- Successfully build your cloud business case with key financial and technical guidance from Azure.
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.
Additional cost optimization resources
- Video: Evaluate and optimize your costs using the Azure Well-Architected Framework
- Ignite session: Get the most out of Azure with Azure Advisor
- Blog: How to optimize your Azure workload costs
- Blog: How to stay on top of Azure best practices
- Microsoft Learn module: Save money with Azure Reserved Instances
- Microsoft Learn module: Get started with Azure Advisor
Get help managing your costs from expert partners
Find help with cost management from an Azure partner with verified capabilities—and move forward confidently, knowing your partner is committed to your success. Depending on your needs, there are two expert partner options to choose from:
Azure advanced specialization partners provide deep expertise in specific scenarios—such as infrastructure migration, app modernization, cloud-native app development, or managing specialized workloads on Azure.
Azure expert managed service providers are generalists, offering validated expertise in managing and optimizing Azure environments, following industry and Microsoft best practices.
Find a partner