Lessons learned improving visibility and cost in Microsoft Azure Monday, February 10, 2020 https://www.meetup.com/msdevmtl/events/267787555/

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Stephane Lapointe
@s_lapointe
Microsoft Azure MVP
Cloud Solutions Architect

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Agenda • Typical cloud journey
• What is Governance?
• Our journey to the cloud
• Visibility
• Cost
• Lessons learned

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Traditional Approach to Control
Block Dev/Ops from directly accessing the cloud (portal/api/cli) to attain control
Developers
Operations
Cloud Engineers responsible
for Cloud environment

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Modern Approach to Control
Cloud-native governance -> removing barriers to compliance and enabling velocity
Cloud Engineers
Developers
Operations
Management
Groups
Templates RBAC
Blueprints
Policies
Policy
Cost
Management

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Things tend to get messy

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Governance = Guardrails

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Management groups
Azure policy
Blueprints
Resource Graph
Cost Management

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Our cloud journey

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Our journey to the
cloud
–
• 2013-14 - Clients dev/staging env
• 2015 - Clients prod env
• 2016 - Cloud first
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
$ CAD/month
from 60$ to 34K$

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It grew organically,
fast
• Unable to explain some
increases
• Is it still in use?
• Who owns what?

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Visibility

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What we did/tried
• Ownership mapping
• Deprecated resources
inventory
• New subscription model

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What we did/tried
• Tags
• Naming convention
• Lot of cost management tools
• Azure Policy
• Azure Resource Graph

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Our subscription
model
• 2 subs per projects/products
• Regular offer for production
• Enterprise Dev/Test offer for
non-production
Using PAYG ?
Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test
offer

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Tags
Tagging policy is essential in a
good governance plan, ours is:
• Mandatory tags
• Required at resource group
• Forced inheritance on child
resources

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provide efficient and performant
resource exploration
ability to query at scale across a given set of subscriptio
ns

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Features
• Blazing fast
• Visibility across your cloud resources
• Powerful querying to gain deeper insights
• Rich aggregation and parsing of granular properties
• Tracking of changes made to resource properties
(preview)
• Support Azure Delegated Resource Management
(Azure Lighthouse)
AzureResour
ce Graph

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Cost

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Tools we used
• All the free ones!
• Azure Consumption
Insights in Power BI
• ShareGate Overcast
• Azure Cost
Management

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Bad reasons for
increases
• Oversized resources
• Misconfiguration
• Forgotten resources
• Human error

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Good reasons for
increases
• Migration to the cloud
• Increased customer
demand
• New projet / product

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What to pay special
attention to
• Slow, constant increases
• Spikes
• Too many regions

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Problems detected
because of cost
Software bugs
• Storage bandwidth
• Automated scaling

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Problems detected
because of cost
Architecture
problems
• Big scale-up
• Multiple scale-up

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Problems detected
because of cost
Misconfiguration
• Database pools
• Premium disk snapshots
• Application Insights without
cap / sampling

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What we learned
• Assign resources/cost
verifications responsibilities
• Perform regular cost trends
verification
• Free software plumbing has
a cost

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What we learned
• Document standards &
guidelines
• Increase employee knowledge
• Tagging is essential
• Prioritize tagging over naming
convention

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Resources
• Getting started with Azure
Resource Graph webinar
• Inherit a tag from the
resource group policy
• Azure Governance
documentation
• Azure Resource Graph
portal dashboard samples

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Stephane
Lapointe
Microsoft Azure MVP
Cloud Solutions Architect
Questions?
Don’t hesitate to reach out