Paola E. Annis - The Road to Azure Cost Governance: Techniques to tame your monthly Azure bill with a continuous optimization journey for your apps

Techniques to tame your monthly Azure bill with a continuous optimization journey for your apps

Paola E. Annis

Giuliano Caglio

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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To my husband, Dario, and my children, Elena and Daniele, who are my main sources of support and joy throughout life, and to the memory of my parents, Clara and Adriano, who made everything possible.

Paola E. Annis

To my daughter, Michela Pinguina Papolla: never forget to overcome your limits you can find insane adventures, and this book is the proof. To my wife, Fabiana, for supporting me and taking care of everything, and to my parents, Francesco and Carla, and my aunt Patrizia, for supporting and making me so curious about everything I do.

Giuliano Caglio

For companies that have started or planned a Digital Transformation program, cloud adoption is a must rather than an option. The flexibility, scalability, and resilience of cloud computing enable a reduced time to market, faster technology adoption, and manageability and sustainability of solutions, which are essential values for a modern company.

During my career, I've faced different approaches to the cloud, from modernize your application first to lift and shift everything, and I've also had the opportunity to challenge my teams on every different aspect of the cloud adoption mission.

Migrating your modern applications may slow down cloud adoption, and while lifting and shifting may be faster, you'll soon realize that lifting and shifting is only the beginning of the journey to cloud adoption. This book will help you focus on the right journey according to your adoption maturity, so that it's affordable for you.

In my current company, we chose a complete lift and shift approach in 2018, switching from an on-premises data center to a full public cloud. We quickly had to learn the first lesson: public cloud requires a different mentality and culture that legacy companies were not yet ready to embrace. And so, in this book, we have dived into this and worked hard to understand, govern, and optimize our cloud services.

Soon we became aware of the second lesson: we need to evolve our services cloud costs understanding. We also need to advance through the infrastructure-based cost representation to the business application one and take advantage of our already present application catalog and documentation. This kind of evolution is perfectly described in this book, and it has permeated our cloud governance model so much that it led us to share cost and performance ownership between the people contributing to the infrastructure and the application owners. Using the end-to-end cost view also allowed us to rewrite the architectural and application guidelines to make our infrastructure increasingly more effective and efficient.

Time goes by, and today I can safely say we are at yet another crossroads. Here, we need to decide how legacy applications will need to either be decommissioned or refactored into cloud-native architectures, and our governance process is the foundation of how we'll be able to play and win this game. This is why I can truly relate to all the topics covered in this book with my experience.

After several years of cloud adoption and its evolution, governance, and control, I can candidly say that adopting a public cloud is not all pretty nor easy, but it's essential. The reward for the braves is a speed of innovation that was unimaginable only a few years ago. You'll also give your company the chance to be a leader in digital transformation, and to be a business that stands the test of time having completed its cloud adoption mission.

In this book, Paola and Giuliano lead us in understanding the cloud world by offering the tools to prepare, face, and manage a challenge that while complex, boasts great benefits for IT and Business.

Marco Barra Caracciolo

Chairman and CEO at Bludigit SpA

Paola E. Annis has worked for over 25 years in IT. Currently at Microsoft enjoying the Azure cloud, she has extensive experience working with strategic customers on large migrations and digital transformation projects. In her daily work, she advocates cost governance, sustainable software engineering, and women in tech communities. She lives in Milan with her kids, cats, and husband. In her spare time, she enjoys heavy metal music while embarking on improbable DIY projects for her country house.

I want to thank my family and all my geek friends who have inspired me and supported me through the years and technologies (you know who you are). Special thanks to, Davide Bedin, Fausto Massa, and everyone else at Microsoft who helped me fall in love with Azure.

Giuliano Caglio has over 15 years of experience. He is constantly looking for challenges in infrastructure management to relate to applications and infrastructure and thus reach a broader view of cloud environments, asset management, and cost governance. He lives near Milan with one daughter, two turtles, and his wife. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, electronics, and railway modeling DIY projects.

I want to thank my cloud team for supporting me in evolving the cost control model and dashboard, and Alessandro Santandrea and Domenico D'Amore for challenging me on business reporting requirements and solutions. Special thanks to Matteo Borgonovo and Christian Meggiorin for supporting and putting up with me while working on challenging projects.

We would also like to thank the whole team at Packt, and the technical reviewers for helping and guiding us throughout this adventure and for making it fun!