The year 2024 marked significant accelerations in AI technologies, driven by advancements in language models, agent ecosystems, and corresponding tools for building them, as well as innovations at the silicon level. As companies adopt emerging technologies, they’re equally focused on calculating the ROI (Return on Investment) and so are you.
Introduction
In 2024, the focus shifted towards rapid advancements in AI technologies, characterized by significant improvements in language models, agent ecosystems, and corresponding tools for their construction, as well as innovations at the silicon level. As companies leverage innovative technologies, they’re increasingly focused on deriving measurable value from their investments, with a keen eye on return on investment (ROI). In this context, FinOps professionals like yourself play a vital role in unlocking the full potential of these investments and maximizing returns for your organization. Together, we aim to collaborate on your path forward, providing the tools necessary for your achievement.
As the 12-month mark approaches, we’ve compiled a comprehensive summary of the significant updates our teams have implemented in Price administration throughout the year, aimed at supporting your FinOps journey and maximizing value from your cloud investments. Explore these innovative features as you refine your investment strategy and unlock new opportunities for growth. Please consult with a financial expert to delve into the fine print.
Price visibility
Price evaluation
Every financial journey starts with a clear understanding of your spending habits and where those dollars are going. Within the Azure portal, you’ll find a valuable tool for rapid price evaluation, enabling you to set up alerts and craft compelling stories. Within the past year, we successfully introduced a cutting-edge tabbed interface, empowering users to effortlessly toggle between various perspectives. By allowing customers to upload and organize multiple datasets with customizable views, the platform streamlines access to critical information. We’ve significantly reduced the load times for these specific views.
To effectively study price evaluation techniques, consider seeking guidance from the following article:
Exports
Throughout the entire year, our team delivered significant advancements to the Exports capability, enabling you to seamlessly export data to your tenant for tailored reporting and analytics purposes. We started by integrating supplementary datasets, encompassing reservation transactions, particulars, suggestions, and price sheets. We have further enhanced your data utilisation by allowing for the export of combined datasets that seamlessly integrate both your actual and amortised costs. We’ve enhanced our offering by introducing support for Parquet format and allowing compression of exported datasets, thereby enabling users to reduce their storage and networking costs.
At present, we are showcasing the capabilities of this powerful platform, enabling seamless dataset exports tailored to meet all your analytics needs. By harnessing the advanced analytics and reporting features of Microsoft Cloud, you’ll gain unparalleled visibility into your cloud expenditure, empowering informed decision-making with actionable insights.
To participate in a preview of the Exports to Cloth connector, please note that.
All the fine print detailing the enhancements can be found within this article.
Copilot enhancements for visibility
Your Copilot AI, a seamless interface for AI, swiftly responds to financial inquiries, delivering precise information and expeditious insights. To further optimize the device’s capabilities, we seamlessly integrated it with our Price Evaluation module, enabling advanced analysis and insightful reporting on the results achieved through Copilot’s Price Evaluation process without manual intervention. With Copilot, you’re free to focus on your task, as all necessary configurations are taken care of, allowing you to remain fully engaged and concentrated on your activity. Please explore a few of the pattern prompts featured below, then click on the “View in price evaluation” button located in each response to continue your investigation into Price evaluation.
In Azure OpenAI deployments using a token-based approach, Copilot can assist in estimating costs by simulating scenarios, such as model modifications and expected usage.
Azure OpenAI prices
The newly introduced Azure OpenAI view provides instant access to pricing information for your Azure OpenAI services. You’ll have a consolidated view to review prices for both token-based and PTU deployments, as well as your reservation purchases, making it easier to track your costs. The various built-in views are available for a comprehensive price evaluation, situated below this prominent view.
Price allocation
Billing tags with inheritance
Effective management and full utilization of cloud expenditures are top strategic objectives for FinOps professionals. To foster accountability across diverse pricing models, it is crucial to establish a consistent method for assigning prices and empower teams to take necessary action. Tags provide a straightforward and environmentally friendly method for annotating your pricing data with enterprise context, aligning it with your specific grouping and allocation requirements. Incorporating tag inheritance in price administration proves a highly effective strategy for consistently tagging both utilization and value data throughout the system. As of January 2024, we introduced the capability to label Bill Sections and Billing Profiles, allowing for customizable tagging and inheritance options that extend to all corresponding pricing information.
You will be able to explore billing tags and tag inheritance in-depth through these articles to gain further insights.
Azure Kubernetes Service pricing provides flexible options to match your containerized application needs. You’re charged based on the number of nodes and the vCPU and memory usage.
The basic pricing model is:
* Node pricing: $0.005 per hour for each node in a Standard_DS2_v2 virtual machine, or $0.05 per hour for each node in a Standard_NC6_v3 virtual machine.
* VCPU pricing: $0.0008 per hour.
* Memory pricing: $0.0004 per GB-hour.
Note that there are also discounts available for reserved instances and spot nodes.
Kubernetes provides a scalable, reliable, and highly accessible platform for running applications. Obtaining specific individual prices for purposes can prove challenging within your AKS clusters. We have successfully made AKS Price Views generally available. These views display the pricing structures for namespaces operating within your clusters, thereby mapping to specific use cases. You will be able to utilize this data to determine fees for entities responsible for performing these tasks. Additional information about perspectives and fee assessment add-ons can be found in those respective articles.
Price optimization
Azure OpenAI provisioned reservations
With the introduction of 1-month and 1-year Provisioned Reservations for Azure OpenAI, organizations leveraging this technology at scale can now enjoy significant discounts compared to traditional pay-as-you-go pricing models. You’ll be able to address these reservations in a price evaluation with the same methodology applied to any other reservation.
For further details regarding the purchase and management of these reservations, consult the accompanying article.
Financial savings plan roles
With Azure financial savings plans, you can now allocate a portion of your eligible compute costs to achieve greater financial flexibility and optimize your budget. Additionally, we have introduced four new role-based entry management roles:
- Financial savings plan administrator
Seeking guidance on maximizing your financial savings?
Cloud sustainability
With enhanced transparency into costs linked to your cloud usage, we have also introduced a sneak peek at the new device. The platform provides IT professionals with real-time emissions data at the asset level, empowering them to track, monitor, and analyze trends in their carbon footprint. The solution offers recommendations for reducing emissions and associated cost savings, aligning with your organization’s sustainability goals while enhancing financial efficiency.
Conclusion
Microsoft’s Pricing Administration has experienced significant advancements over the past year, focusing on enhancing your cloud spend optimization and advancing FinOps capabilities throughout 2024. We’re grateful for the value these routine upgrades have brought to your experience, and we’re excited to continue collaborating on this shared adventure in the year ahead. Stay tuned for even more electrifying developments in 2025.
