September 2022

” 39% of enterprises with revenue 50M-1B USD uses Azure App Service”
– Gartner

Azure App Service is one of the popular cloud services offered by Microsoft. IT services, finance, and manufacturing enterprises widely adopt App Services for their ample benefits. North America ranks on top with 51% followed by Europe, Middle East, and Africa marks 21%.

As enterprises invest a huge chunk of their cloud infrastructure budget in Azure app service, let’s see in this article the possible ways to optimize their expenses efficiently.

What is Azure App Service?

“Quickly build, deploy, and scale web apps and API on your terms”
– Azure

Azure app service is a web-hosting platform from Microsoft. This PaaS (Platform as a Service) hosts more than 2M apps and sites designed with different coding languages (.Net, Python, etc.) on Azure as of now. It facilitates the users to just give their code and configuration files and focus on their projects while Azure takes care of the infrastructure maintenance, security, etc.

Released in 2013, offers significant benefits like,

Built-in scaling options(manual/customized)

Zero downtime deployments

Built-in CI/CD and operations monitoring

Strong Visual Studio and Visual studio code integration

Deployment slots accommodate faster app updates, testing, development

Automatic security patching

App Service Environment v3 allows network access external to your apps.

Allied services like Azure CDN, Azure Front Door, Azure Security Center, and Application Insights further simplify cloud operations

Suggested reading: Check the Cloud Cost Optimization tips

Azure App Service Cost Optimization Strategies

1. Choose the right fit

App Service comes with flexible pricing plans like free, basic service plan, standard service plan, premium v2/v3 service plan, isolated service plan, etc. Charging is based on the compute resources we utilize on a per-second basis. Analyzing the hosting needs itself solves half the problem eliminating the unintended bills.

For example, if your apps have low traffic volume, (CPU & memory usage) ‘The Basic Service Plan’ is more than enough starting from $0.018/hour instead of the ‘Standard Service Plan’ costing $0.095/hour.

2. Audit

Study the existing cloud app service usage thoroughly. As organizations boom over years developing various niche products, projects, and services, cloud services bundle up along with the underused or left out. When there is a change in the organization hierarchy or let’s say, the cloud infrastructure manager leaves the organization without documenting the left-out resources. The new employee continues with the current infrastructure. This will balloon the monthly cloud bills without adding any productive business outcomes. Periodically audit the App Service usage and safely remove the left out after checking its dependencies over other projects/apps.

3. Alternate

A wrong specification pick can easily pile up the bills. The initial stages of infrastructure setup wouldn’t involve a proper prediction of the compute requirement.

For example, let’s say a cloud engineer had chosen P2V2 with 420 total ACU and 7 GB memory costing $180.31 USD/month during the app service creation without knowing the app’s compute power requirement. Assume it hosts 4 apps. If the utilization is less than 50%, resize it to P1V2 with 210 total ACU charging half the costs of P2V2.

4. Combine

Look for options to progressively reorganize the app services. We can deploy different web apps and APIs under one App Service Plan by specifying proper configuration details during setup. But make sure the regions of App Service and App Service Plans are the same. Because specifications differ from region to region.

5. Understand the associated costs

It is crucial to understand that our bills will not only have Azure App Service as a line item. Additional costs also accrue like App Service Domain costs (per year), IP-based certificate bindings cost (Standard tier and above), Virtual network cost, Storage account cost, App Service Certificates cost, etc. These costs can still add up to the bills even after deleting all apps in App Service. Make sure you delete all these additional resources as well.

Want a Simple Solution?

CloudCADI ends your search for a one-stop Azure App Service cost optimization tool. It gives you all actionable insights and recommendations for effective App Service cost optimization under one dashboard with options to dive deep and check the root causes. Sounds simple? Call us today.

Enterprises globally prefer to use cloud cost optimization tools to maximize their cloud investments. While certain organizations use native tools provided by AWS, GCP, and Azure others tend to opt for homegrown tools or third-party tools. Few even mix up to reduce cloud spending. According to a report from report of the FinOps Foundation, enterprises use an average of 3.7 tools for their cloud cost optimization process. Let’s see in this article a few of the best cloud cost optimization tools you can evaluate for 2024.

1. CloudCADI

CloudCADI is a one suite cloud cost optimization tool offered by Amadis Technologies Inc., USA. It got you covered for all your cloud FinOps needs. It makes the day of cloud practitioners easy with an effective dashboard, and precise reports with which allows show back to the lowest possible unit and start restructuring almost immediately. This tool comes with need-of-the-hour features like,

Cloud Native – It leverages the power of cloud features like scalability, elasticity, etc. facilitating faster deployment

Externalized Business Rule Engine – It allows the user to play around with multiple cloud assets recommendations, so the user has the flexibility to choose as per their infrastructure and project needs.

Non-intrusive nature – It stays within your cloud environment eliminating the need to worry about the security breach and third-party intrusion

Role-based data access – Customizing the cost optimization data visibility based on roles (Engineering team, Finance team, etc.) is simple with Cloud CADI.

Showback- It allows you to drill down and find the root cause of the cost overruns to take immediate actions.

End-to-End Automation- It facilitates the seamless integration of ticketing tools like ServiceNow.

Alerts- It has customizable reporting& alert capabilities to give visibility over IaaS/SaaS/PaaS services and assets, resulting in a better understanding of activities in the cloud

Clients – Johnson & Johnson, Unisys, GSM Outdoors, Exafluence, DigiKey

Founded – 2019

HQ: New Jersey, USA

Other Tools

‘Finops Foundation‘ is a non-profit organization that was established to promote best practices, standards, and education in the emerging field of cloud financial management, recently released a report on “Different Usage Types of FinOps Tools” (ref. figure below). Let’s see some of the tools mentioned,

2. AWS Cost Explorer

A native product of AWS cloud service provider helps to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. Few key features are,

- Monthly costs report – AWS Cost Explorer includes a default report that helps you visualize the costs and usage associated with your top five cost-accruing AWS services and gives you a detailed breakdown of all services in the table view.

- Hourly & resource level granularity – AWS Cost Explorer helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over a daily or monthly granularity.

- Savings plan reports – It provides you with two reports to help analyse your Savings Plans purchases and saving opportunities – Savings Plans utilization report and Savings Plans coverage report.

- Reservation reports – The reservation utilization report visualizes your aggregate reservation utilization and allows you to set a custom reservation utilization target. The reservation coverage report visualizes your overall reservation coverage and allows you to set a custom reservation coverage target.

Few Clients – Verisk, Airbnb, Arista

Founded – 2014

HQ: Seattle, Washington, United States.