Introduction
The year 2024 was all about accelerating advancements in AI technologies with improved and much more powerful language models, agent eco-systems and accompanying tools to build them, and of course advancements in the silicon layer. As companies adopt these new technologies, they are also focused on the ROI (Return on investment) and you as FinOps practitioners have a key role in enabling your organizations to get maximum value from their investments. We, at Microsoft Cost Management, want to partner with you in your journey and will continue to provide you with the tools that are needed for your success.
As we wrap up this year, I have summarized all the significant updates our teams have made in Cost management throughout the year to enable your FinOps journey and to get the most value out of your cloud investments. I encourage you to explore these new capabilities as you look at optimizing your investments. Also, please refer to the monthly blogs to dive into the details.
Cost visibility
Cost analysis
Everything starts with getting to know how much you are spending and where you are spending. Cost analysis, in the Azure portal, is a great tool for you to perform quick analysis of your costs, create alerts, and build reports. This year, we rolled out a new tabbed interface that enables seamless switching between different views. This allows users to relate various datasets and pin views for quick and easy access. Additionally, we have optimized the load time of these views.
To learn about Cost analysis, please refer to the below article:
Exports
Throughout the year, we made significant enhancements to the Exports experience which allows you to export data to your tenant for custom reporting and analytical needs. We started by adding more datasets: Reservations transactions, reservations details, reservations recommendations, and pricesheet. We also added support for your usage datasets to be exported in FOCUS 1.0 format which combines your actual and amortized costs. We followed this up by adding support for Parquet format and adding the capability to compress your exported files which can help you save on your storage and networking costs.
We are now previewing the ability for you to export your datasets directly to Microsoft Fabric which provides a great platform your all your analytics needs. You can leverage advanced analytics and reporting capabilities of Microsoft Fabric to gain deeper insights into your cloud spending and make data-driven decisions.
To sign up for a preview of the Exports to Fabric connector, please submit this form.
You can find all the details of the improvements we have made in this article:
Copilot enhancements for visibility
Copilot, your UI for AI, can answer your cost-related queries in natural language and provide you with quick insights. We enhanced this tool by integrating with Cost analysis so that you can further analyze and report on the results you got from Copilot in Cost analysis without any manual intervention. Copilot does all the configurations for you so that you remain focused on your task at hand. I encourage you to try some of the sample prompts we have in the below article and click on the View in cost analysis button which you will see in most of the responses to continue your exploration of Cost analysis.
For token-based Azure OpenAI deployments, Copilot can also help you estimate costs for your simulation scenarios like changes in the model or anticipated usage.
Azure OpenAI costs
The recently released Azure OpenAI view provides you easy access to view costs for your Azure OpenAI workloads. You can view the costs of both token-based and PTU (Provisioned throughput unit) deployments along with your reservation purchases in one view. This view is available with other built-in views under Smart views in Cost analysis.
Cost allocation
Billing tags with inheritance
Full allocation of cloud spending is one of the top priorities for FinOps practitioners. To drive accountability across your different cost units, you must have a solid strategy to allocate costs to them and empower them to take the necessary actions. Tags provide an easy and efficient way to annotate your cost records with business context for your grouping and allocation needs. Tag Inheritance in cost management is a great way to ensure that all your usage and cost records are tagged. In January 2024 we launched the ability for you to tag Invoice Sections and Billing Profiles and you can also configure these tags to be inherited and applied to all underlying cost records.
You can read about Billing tags and tag inheritance in these articles to get more details.
AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) Cost views
Kubernetes provides a scalable, reliable, and highly available platform to run your applications. We know how challenging it can be to get individual costs of applications running on your AKS clusters. So, we made AKS Cost Views generally available. These views provide the costs of namespaces running on your clusters which in turn can be mapped to your applications. You can then use this data to allocate costs to teams responsible for running these applications. You can learn more about the views and the cost analysis add-on in these articles:
Cost optimization
Azure OpenAI provisioned reservations
With the introduction of 1-month and 1-year Provisioned Reservations, businesses that commit to using Azure OpenAI on a scale can enjoy substantial discounts compared to the standard pay-as-you-go pricing. You can manage these reservations in Cost analysis in the same way as any other reservation.
For further details on how to purchase and manage these reservations, please refer to the article below:
Savings plan roles
Azure savings plans allow you to save up to 65% of your eligible compute costs to give you more flexibility in managing your savings plans, we added four new role-based access control roles:
- Savings plan administrator
- Savings plan purchaser
- Savings plan contributor
- Savings plan reader
To learn more about managing your savings plans, refer to this article:
Cloud sustainability
In addition to improved visibility into costs related to your cloud usage, we also released a preview of the Azure carbon optimization tool. It provides IT admins and engineers with emissions data at the resource level, helping them monitor and track their emissions data and analyze trends. It also offers recommendations to reduce emissions and associated cost savings, supporting your sustainability goals alongside financial efficiency.
Conclusion
2024 has been a year of quite a few advancements in Microsoft Cost Management, all aimed at helping you optimize your cloud spending and enhance your FinOps capabilities. We hope these regular updates have been valuable to you and look forward to continuing this journey together in the coming year. Stay tuned for more exciting updates in 2025!
The post Microsoft Cost Management—2024 year in review appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.
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