My talk on FinOps on Azure at the Azure Community Enthusiasts User Group.

1. Efficient Cloud Resource
Management
Unleashing FinOps for Azure Cost Optimisation
By Estêvão B. Saleme, 27th Dec 2023

2. https://www.linkedin.com/in/estevaosaleme/
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3. Introduction
• Motivation
• What is FinOps?
• What’s new in this talk?
Where can I save money?
• Azure FinOps Review Assessment
• Analysing costs – inform/understand
• Optimising costs - resources tips and tweaks
Architecting on Azure
• Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus
Conclusions and key takeaways

5. Source: https://www.cloudzero.com/state-of-cloud-cost-intelligence/ (2022)

6. Source: https://info.flexera.com/CM-REPORT-State-of-the-Cloud (11/2023)

7. Source: https://www.cloudzero.com/state-of-cloud-cost-intelligence/ (2022)
• Wasteful cloud spend - high-priority issue

8. Source: https://www.vertice.one/inside-saas/reports/cloud-spend-report-2024/thank-you?submissionGuid=142d43b9-26e5-4464-a82d-
a02c5901a3f2#embracing-finops-strategies (11/2023)

9. Source: FinOps Foundation, Technical Advisory Council -
https://www.finops.org/about/technical-advisory-council
(12/2023)

10. Source: FinOps Foundation - https://youtu.be/VDrcgEne6lU?si=tzZQ7-RR13h1K1r6 (2023)

11. Inform Optimise Operate
• Visibility
• Allocation
• Benchmarking
• Budgeting
• Forecasting
• Reservation planning and
increased commitment
• Rightsizing
• Automating, turning off any
wasteful use of resources
• Architecting efficient
solutions
• Business objectives evaluation
• Metrics against objectives
• Cloud Cost Center of
Excellence
• Policies and models

12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb5mCbxN6tI
Inform Optimise Operate

13. Source: FinOps Foundation - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gt9ev4OU79-
N0tkkdx78rrZM0jJPuxQqlL6pCImL4ww/edit#slide=id.g2506e90ba5f_99_0 (2023)

15. FinOps Review Assessment
My FinOps practices

16. Source: https://www.vertice.one/cloud-spend-insights (11/2023)

17. How do we see and monitor the costs of resources?

18. Actual
Without reservations
Amortised cost
Upfront reservations

19. Budgeting Alert creation

22. How do I reduce the cost of my virtual machine?
Help me choose the right VM size for my workload?
Summarize my costs for the last 6 months
[Context] How can we reduce our costs?

23. • Command line tool to get the cost of
your Azure subscription
• Uses the Azure Cost Management API
to get the cost and output the results to
the console, text, csv, markdown or
JSON
Source: https://github.com/mivano/azure-cost-cli (12/2023)

24. Feature Azure Storage Queue Azure Service Bus Queue
Use Cases
Simple point-to-point communication
with high speed and volume throughput
for basic decoupling.
Advanced messaging scenarios, publish/subscribe
(topics/subscriptions), temporal decoupling, and more.
Access Method
Authenticated calls using HTTP or
HTTPS.
Supports advanced messaging scenarios.
Message Ordering
Typically first-in-first-out, but can be out
of order.
Provides ordering guarantee through sessions.
Delivery Modes At-Least-Once delivery. At-Most-Once or At-Least-Once delivery modes.
Maximum Queue Size
Up to 500 TB (limited to storage account
capacity).
1 GB to 80 GB.
Dead-lettering No (can be created manually). Automatic dead-lettering.
Receive Behaviour Non-blocking. Blocking or non-blocking with timeout.
Batched Send No. Yes.
Duplicate Detection No. Yes.
Message Auto-forwarding No. Yes.
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/service-bus-azure-and-service-bus-queues-compared-contrasted (12/2023)

25. Service Bus Storage Queues
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/service-bus/ (12/2023)
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/queues/ (12/2023)

26. Number of
operations (Million)
Service Bus ($) * Storage Queue ($) *
1 9.81 (base charge) 4.00
13 9.81 (base charge) 9.60
50 39.41 23.60
100 79.41 43.60
*On 14/12/2023

29. Purchasing Models
vCore DTU
vCore DTU
Transparent resource
usage, granular control
Bundled measure
(compute, storage, I/O),
abstracted details
Flexible, higher limits for
resource-intensive
workloads
Simpler and pre-
configured options,
potential limitations
Flexible, fine-tuning Simple, fixed combinations

30. Resource Characteristics Estimate Price ($) *
SQL Server on VM 8 vCores (D4), no backup $1,401.60
Azure Hybrid Benefit for SO and SQL $449.68
Azure SQL Managed Instance 8 vCores, no backup $1,473.25
Azure Hybrid Benefit $889.45
Azure SQL Database
Single Database 8 vCores, provisioned, 32GB storage $1,478.03
Single Database Serverless, 8 vCores, 744 hours $3,110.79
Single Database Serverless, 8 vCores, 372 hours $1,558.04
Single Database Serverless, 8 vCores, 248 hours $1,040.45
Single Database 8 vCores, Hyperscale $2,138.87
Elastic Pool 200 eDTUs, 250 GB $294.87
Elastic Pool 400 eDTUs, 400 GB, up to 500 DBs $882.58
* Estimate price on 18/12/2023, using standard configurations, locally redundant

31. Architecting on Azure

32. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus
Scenario Description
Your system receives a huge volume of product data coming from
an External message broker. Every time there is an update on a
legacy system, data is ingested (~10 KB) into a Rabbit MQ
queue whereby the ACL Adapter receives and publishes them to
an Azure Service Bus topic called LegacyTopic. This topic, in
turn, filters out message to subscriptions A and B based on the
country of the product. MS Tax Germany consumes messages
from Sub A and MS Tax Brazil consumes messages from Sub B, so
they calculate and apply localised tax rules.
You were not told the numbers of updates the ACL adapter
would receive. Then, you spin up a Service Bus standard tier in
DEV as you don't have to pay anything upfront. It seemed a
reasonable choice as your system works well but you don't know
how much load you'll receive in STG or PRD. Then, in STG you
decided to keep things small and spin up another Service Bus
standard tier. Now, you are receiving 2 billion requests per
month to process near-production data volume in a constant
pace (no spikes). Everything is working fine but you noticed that
your bill has increased substantially.
What would you do to improve costs without changing the
applications in STG? What about PRD?

33. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/service-bus (2023)

34. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus

35. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus

36. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus
Price ($)*
Number of Operations
(million) Standard Premium Savings (%)
100 79,41 677,08 88,27
500 279,41 677,08 58,73
1000 529,41 677,08 21,81
1300 679,41 677,08 -0,34
1800 929,41 677,08 -37,27
2000 1.029,41 677,08 -52,04
2800 1.379,41 677,08 -103,73
Price ($)*
Premium tier
Number of Operations
(million) Standard Price
Messaging
Units
100 79,41 677,08 1
500 279,41 677,08 1
1000 529,41 677,08 1
1300 679,41 677,08 1
1800 929,41 902,77 1 + 1/3
2000 1.029,41 1.015,62 1 + 1/2
2800 1.379,41 1.354,16 2
*On 14/12/2023

37. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/automate-update-messaging-units (2023)

38. Is the Standard tier always cheaper? The case of Service Bus

39. QUESTION: Is the Standard tier always cheaper? Not necessarily…

40. Conclusions and Key
Takeaways

42. QA Session
https://www.linkedin.com/in/estevaosaleme/