Cost, Budgets and Reservations¶
You pay for what you deploy in your subscription. The platform team pays for the hub.
See what you spend¶
Open Cost Management + Billing → Cost analysis in the Azure portal. You need Cost Management Reader (or a role that includes it) on your subscription. Useful views:
| View | Use |
|---|---|
| Accumulated costs | Spending against time and your budget |
| Daily costs | Spot spikes early |
| Costs by service / by resource | Find the expensive parts |
Costs by tag (costcentre, workload) |
Allocate to teams |
Also use Advisor for rightsizing and unused resources, and switch development and test resources off outside working hours. For virtual machines, see Cost optimisation for managed VMs: the decision flow, auto-shutdown by tag and the disk cost review.
Budgets¶
The MCP spoke baseline does not create a budget. Your platform team can add:
- a budget with e-mail alerts per subscription (a budget only notifies, it doesn't stop resources), for example at 75% and 100% of the amount, through a policy or as an extra step in your spoke setup;
- a monthly cost export to a central storage account for reporting.
Ask your platform team whether this is in place and who receives the alerts. How the platform team can export cost data of all subscriptions for central reporting: Billing export. If it isn't, create a budget yourself in Cost Management, with the contacts of your team.
From a customer platform
One customer platform created a budget with 75% and 100% e-mail notifications with every landing zone, offered a chat bot command to change the budget (subscription name, amount, start date; reviewed afterwards by the platform team and reported to FinOps), and exported cost data monthly for reporting. These are platform choices, not MCP features.
From another customer platform
Another platform kept the budget of each platform subscription as a value (an amount in euros) next to the subscription definition in its automation repository. A change is a work item, an edit on a branch and a pull request that a reviewer approves, and a pipeline deploys the new budget after the merge. If your platform works with code, a budget as a field of the subscription is reviewable and traceable. This is a platform choice, not an MCP feature.
Reservations¶
An Azure Reservation gives a discount if you commit to a stable amount of compute or storage for one or three years (for example larger VMs, databases, storage, Fabric capacity).
| Choice | Options |
|---|---|
| Scope | Shared across subscriptions (good if the load moves between subscriptions) or Single subscription (stable workloads) |
| Term | 1 or 3 years. Longer gives more discount. |
| Size | Azure shows a reservation recommendation from your past usage. If your usage fluctuates too much, there is no recommendation. |
Process (typical):
- The owner of the subscription decides (the cost lands on their subscription).
- Your FinOps or finance team reviews, if your organisation has one.
- Send a request to the platform team (or whoever holds the billing rights) with: subscriptions, capacity to reserve and term. Purchasing needs special billing rights that workload teams usually don't have.
Reservations for virtual machines¶
A common rule: a VM either has an auto-shutdown schedule or is reserved. Reserve production VMs that run all day, once their usage is stable: after a period of monitoring, not before you have right-sized the VM. A one-year term is the flexible choice. In one platform it gave a discount of about 40 percent compared with pay-as-you-go, but the discount depends on the VM family, the region and the term. Look at the reservation recommendation in the portal.
Ask your platform team to help you set up reservations or schedules.
Delete what you don't need¶
Delete unused resources. To remove a whole spoke and its subscription, see How to request: delete a spoke. Only the workload owner can request deletion, and it is permanent.