How Microsoft Azure is Helping FinOps Practitioners

Microsoft joined the FinOps Foundation as a premier member in February 2023 with an aim to:

1. Define specifications and evolve best practices

2. Align their collective guidance

3. Improve their products and services

4. Offer advanced training and certification programs

5. Engage with the community

Microsoft has planned to work around and invest in the pointers listed above. Let us see, what are current developments of Microsoft Azure Services in the area of FinOps.

Nurturing Growth and Learning for FinOps Practitioners

For many years, Microsoft has been committed to helping people effectively manage and reduce their expenses. Now, with Microsoft's focus on FinOps, this year becomes crucial for practitioners who handle costs in Microsoft Azure.

To support this initiative, Microsoft has launched a dedicated FinOps solutions page. This page serves as a centralized hub for all the resources currently available and those planned for the future. Whether you are new to FinOps or already have experience, this page will connect you with Microsoft's solutions that can empower your organization to adopt FinOps best practices more efficiently.

The FinOps solutions page offers a helpful resource called the "FinOps with Azure e-book." This e-book is 20 pages long and provides valuable information for those who are new to FinOps in Azure. It explains the principles of FinOps and showcases Microsoft's solutions that can assist you in your cloud journey and enable your organization to get the most out of the cloud.

Once you have grasped the basics of FinOps, you can explore the advanced document called FinOps documentation. This resource introduces FinOps and the FinOps Framework, providing a guide on how to approach each step of the FinOps lifecycle. Whether you are a beginner or have experience, you will also find guides that help you understand and implement different capabilities within Azure.

Microsoft has made updates to the Cost Management documentation to make it easier for you to find the information you need quickly. Whether you're looking for guidance on reporting and analytics, monitoring, optimization, cost allocation, or automation and extensibility, everything you need to implement your FinOps capabilities in Microsoft Cost Management is now organized in a way that is user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Accelerating Answers for FinOps Practitioners

There have been significant improvements in the performance of the Cost analysis feature. The time it takes to load, and display cost information has become much faster in recent months. Additionally, there are more improvements planned in Microsoft Azure services for the future.

While many users are already familiar with customizable charts in Cost analysis, there is a newer feature called smart views that not everyone may be aware of. Smart views in Cost analysis are like helpful assistants that provide useful information about your costs. They can detect anomalies and offer more flexible options for downloading data. With smart views, you can also work on multiple cost perspectives at the same time, allowing you to explore different angles of your costs simultaneously.

When you expand a row, you can quickly see a summary of cost details without any hassle. And now, for the first time, you can easily dig deeper into specific cost information with just one click.

Drilling down in smart views improves the way you filter and navigate through your cost data. Instead of manually searching for values in a separate filter, you can directly click on the item you're interested in. This action will switch the view to show you more specific details about that particular cost. If you want to explore related costs, you can use the context menu (usually represented by three dots) next to a name. From there, you can choose different attributes to find resources of the same type or in the same resource group, for example.

Scaling FinOps Practitioners' Efforts

For most users, the built-in Cost Management features in the Azure Portal are sufficient for their basic needs. However, there are situations where additional capabilities are necessary. You might want to automate the process of onboarding and setup, or you might require advanced reporting that combines business data with cost information. In some cases, you may have a more intricate cost allocation or chargeback strategy that necessitates integration with other systems.

No matter what situation you're in, the FinOps toolkit open-source project aims to provide solutions that automate and enhance the native capabilities of the cloud to meet the common requirements of the FinOps community. This toolkit is a collaborative project driven by a global community of contributors, including insights from Microsoft architects and engineers working in the field. It helps you get started quickly by offering:

• Starter kits that assist you in initiating cost management and optimization.

• Automation scripts that simplify the configuration and management of costs on a larger scale.

• Advanced solutions that facilitate the development of customized solutions to suit your specific needs.