Aug 24 2024
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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:

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:

graphical user interface, application, email

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 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:

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:

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.

The post Microsoft Cost Management updates—July 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog.

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