Do you want to learn Azure's best practices and optimize your costs? We asked a bunch of developers and infrastructure pros at ShareGate to help build our Ultimate Azure cost optimization checklist for cloud teams. The result was a ton of tips and insights, most of which were learned by experience and way too valuable not to share! Here are 26 of them, in no particular order, to add to your list of Azure best practices to follow for optimal security, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and more.

1. Brought to you by
26 Azure
best practices
you may not have thought of

2. Prefer virtual machine scale sets
over individual VMs for similar
workloads; they offer several
benefits on the management front.
1.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

3. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Plan from the start for redundancy,
backups, and disaster recovery.
2.

4. When provisioning compute, target a
higher SKU at first, then downscale, to
ensure the destination cluster stamp
supports that size/pricing plan.
3.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

5. Disposable environments are hard to
achieve and often leave behind
orphaned resources.
4.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

6. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Make sure the VM size and family
you need are available in your
target region.
5.

7. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Use a messaging approach (queues,
messages, web jobs/serverless) to
prevent monoliths.
6.

8. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Use Logic App to enable a richer
notification and alerting experience.
7. https://www.codit.eu/blog/handling-azure-alerts-with-azure-logic-apps/

9. Prefer resource sharing over
individual resources if isolation
is not required.
8.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

10. Use DevTest Labs for
development teams.
9.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

11. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
10.
A good tagging convention
is more important and more
valuable than a strict
naming convention.

12. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) instead
of creating resources manually—this will
also help self-document your
infrastructure.
11.

13. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
When you scale up/out compute, set a
reminder or an autoscale rule to make
sure it gets downscaled/scaled in.
12.

14. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Review App Service deployment slots.
These are in fact collocated resources in
your App Service Plan and could impact
the performance of other environments.
13.

15. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Split ARM templates into smaller pieces to
facilitate the development feedback loop
(this helps you deploy only what is needed).
14.

16. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
If you need to scale up multiple times to
address performance issues, it might be
a good idea to revisit the design.
Further reading: Microsoft's Azure architecture center.
15.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/

17. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
16.
Prefer horizontal scaling
over vertical scaling.

18. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Perform backup restore drills
(you’ll be happy you did).
17.

19. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
18.
Enable soft delete on
storage accounts.

20. Use Just in Time mechanisms
like Privileged Identity
Management (PIM) and
just-in-time (JIT) VM access.
19.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

21. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
20.
Use a network security
group (NSG) on subnets
and/or network cards.

22. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Pay attention to Azure Security
Center recommendations.
21.

23. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Whenever possible, restrict traffic
to essential IP addresses via
firewall and whitelisting.
22.

24. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Enable Azure Key Vault
logging to keep track of
vault access.
23.

25. 24.
Always use standard
disks (not premium)
for snapshots.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

26. Keep an eye on egress - bandwidth
costs can sneak up on you.
25.
26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of

27. 26 Azure best practices you may not have thought of
Don't forget that deleting a VM
won't delete related resources like
attached disks and public IP
addresses. You need to remove
those manually as well.
26.

28. Fun fact: the items in this slideshare were directly based off ShareGate
Overcast’s comprehensive costsaving recommendations engine.
Head over to sharegate.com/overcast-demo to see it in action.
ShareGate Overcast keeps cloud costs in check. Simple as that.
sharegate.com/overcast