Microsoft Cost Management updates—July 2024

Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Cost Management comes in.

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Microsoft Cost Management can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

• Exports enhancements: Parquet format support, file compression, and Fabric ingestion
• Pricing updates on Azure.com
• Your feedback matters: Take our quick survey! 
• New ways to save money with Microsoft Cloud
• Documentation updates

Let’s dig into the details.

Exports enhancements: Parquet format support, file compression, and Fabric ingestion 

In our last blog, I spoke about the support for FOCUS 1.0 (FinOps Cost Usage and Specification) datasets in Exports. We continue to make enhancements to the Exports functionality bringing support for the parquet format and file compression which can potentially help you achieve 40 to 70% file size reduction. These new cost saving features are initially available for the following datasets: Cost and usage details (Actual, Amortized, FOCUS) and Price Sheet. They aim to streamline your cost management processes, improve data handling efficiency, and reduce storage and network costs, all while providing comprehensive insights into your Azure spending.

Parquet is an open-source, columnar storage file format designed for efficient data processing and analytics. It offers several benefits over traditional formats like Comma-Separated Values (CSV), some of which are included below:

• Efficient storage and reduced network cost: Parquet’s columnar format allows for better compression and encoding schemes, resulting in smaller file sizes. Compressed datasets occupy less space, translating to lower storage expenses and file transfer network cost.

• Improved data transfer speed: Smaller file sizes mean faster data transfer rates, enhancing the efficiency of data operations.
• Faster query performance: By storing data by column, parquet enables faster data retrieval and query performance, especially for large datasets.
• Optimized analytics: Parquet format is optimized for big data tools and can be easily integrated with various analytics platforms.

To further reduce the size of your datasets, you can now compress your CSV files using GNU ZIP (GZIP) and parquet files using Snappy.

Here is the screenshot showing the new configuration options:

Please refer to this article to get started.

Microsoft Fabric ingestion 

Microsoft Fabric, as we know, is a great tool for data reporting and analytics where you can reference datasets from multiple sources without copying the data. We have now added new documentation to make it easy for you to ingest your exported costs datasets into new or existing Fabric workspaces. Just follow the steps included in this article. 

Pricing updates on Azure.com

We’ve been working hard to make some changes to our Azure pricing experiences, and we’re excited to share them with you. These changes will help make it easier for you to estimate the costs of your solutions.

• We’re thrilled to announce the launch of new pricing pages for Azure AI Health (now generally available) and the innovative Phi-3 service (now in preview), ensuring you have the latest information at your fingertips.
• Our Azure AI suite has seen significant enhancements, with updated calculators for Azure AI Vision and Azure AI Language, ensuring you have access to the most current offers and SKUs. The Azure AI Speech service now proudly offers generally available pricing for the cutting-edge Text to Speech add-on feature “Avatar”, and Azure AI Document Intelligence has added pricing for new training and custom generative stock-keeping units (SKUs).
• To maintain the accuracy and relevance of our offers, we’ve deprecated the Azure HPC Cache and SQL Server Stretch pricing pages and calculators. This step ensures that you’re only presented with the most up-to-date and valid options.
• The pricing calculator has been updated with the latest offers and SKUs for Azure Container Storage, Azure AI Vision, Azure Monitor, and PostgreSQL, reflecting our commitment to providing you with the most accurate cost estimates.
• We’ve introduced new prices and SKUs across various services, including pricing for the new Intel Dv6/Ev6 series (preview) and ND Mi300X v5 series for Virtual Machines, auxiliary logs offer for Azure Monitor, and audio streaming and closed caption SKUs for Azure Communication Services. The Azure Databricks service now features pricing for Automated Serverless Compute, and the Azure Container Storage service pricing page now reflects generally available pricing.
• Our dedication to enhancing your pricing experience is reflected in the continuous improvements made to several pages, including Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure SQL Database, Azure Migrate, Azure Cosmos DB (autoscale-provisioned), Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Fabric, Linux Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Web PubSub, Azure Content Delivery Network, and Azure SignalR Service.

We’re constantly working to improve our pricing tools and make them more accessible and user-friendly. We hope you find these changes helpful in estimating the costs for your Azure Solutions. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future improvements, please let us know!

Your Feedback Matters: Take our quick survey!

If you use Azure in your day-to-day work from deploying resources to managing costs and billing, we would love to hear from you. (All experience levels welcome!) Please take a few moments to complete this short, 5 to 10-minute survey to help us understand your roles, responsibilities, and the challenges you face in managing the cloud. Your feedback will help us improve our services to better meet your personal needs. 

New ways to save money in the Microsoft Cloud

Here are new and updated offerings which can potentially help with your cost optimization needs:

• Generally Available: Azure Virtual Network Manager mesh and direct connectivity
• Generally Available: Announcing kube-egress-gateway for Kubernetes
• Generally Available: Run your Databricks Jobs with Serverless compute for workflows
• Generally Available: Azure Elastic SAN Feature Updates
• Generally Available: Azure Virtual Network Manager mesh and direct connectivity
• Public Preview: Summary rules in Azure Monitor Log Analytics, for optimal consumption experiences and cost
• Public Preview: Continuous Performance Diagnostics for Windows VMs to enhance VM Troubleshooting
• Public Preview: Azure cross-subscription Load Balancer
• Public Preview: Advanced Network Observability for your Azure Kubernetes Service clusters through Azure Monitor
• New Azure Advisor recommendations for Azure Database for PostgreSQL—Flexible Server

Want a more guided experience? Start with Control Azure spending and manage bills with Microsoft Cost Management.

Documentation updates 

Here are a few costs related documentation updates you might be interested in:

• Update: Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit FAQ
• Update: Pay for your Azure subscription by wire transfer
• Update: Tutorial: Create and manage budgets
• Update: Understand cost details fields
• Update: Quickstart: Start using Cost analysis
• Update: Tutorial: Improved exports experience—Preview
• Update: Transfer Azure Enterprise enrollment accounts and subscriptions
• Update:  Migrate from Consumption Usage Details API
• Update: Change contact information for an Azure billing account
• New: Avoid unused subscriptions

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management and Billing documentation change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request. You can also submit a GitHub issue. We welcome and appreciate all contributions!

What’s next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. Don’t forget to check out the previous Microsoft Cost Management updates. We’re always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming.

Follow the Microsoft Cost Management YouTube channel to stay in the loop with new videos as they’re released and let us know what you’d like to see next.

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