Maximizing the use of your Developer Azure Credits across your Development Team

Introduction

Many organisations obtain Azure credits from sources such as:

• Visual Studio subscriptions (like MSDN), which can provide developers with up to $150 per month
• Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) credits

These credits are used for activities including:

• Personal skill development
• Running internal projects
• Providing demonstrations
• Prototyping solutions

Although these programmes help organisations access Azure credits, it is often difficult to evaluate how efficiently those credits are being used.

Kovai.co is an ISV specializing in building solutions which leverage Microsoft technologies and as a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Infrastructure, Data & AI and Digital & App Innovation we also get access to quite a few MPN solution benefits which give us Azure credits.

Kovai.co has multiple development teams across a number of products, all of whom use different kinds of Azure credits from MPN and Microsoft Partner Network.

Problem Examples

Using these credits, we found that some of the following scenarios would happen often:

• A developer would complain they have used all of their credits, and they are now blocked on learning a new technology we have had then looking at
• The DevOps team have no idea who is using which technologies or how much of the credit we are using or wasting each month.
• Developers just build stuff and don’t really think about the costs when they are building a demo or proof of concept
• We had a demo which was about to be presented to the engineering director, but it didn’t work because the credits were all used

Approach

As an ISV we are building a product called Turbo360. Normally we are working with Enterprise Customers, SMB Customers, MSP’s and CSP’s to help them manage the Azure spend for Azure customers.

The pricing model for Turbo360 is quite flexible and based on the Azure spending you are managing with Turbo360. In this scenario it is very affordable to manage a small Azure spend on Turbo360.

For many Turbo360 customers their need for the product is related to reducing their out-of-control Azure bill which has lots of waste in it. For some Turbo360 customers, once they are on top of their costs it’s about reducing risk and early detection of cost creep. In this case we can use Turbo360 to help Kovai.co development teams reduce the risk. As an example, 1 day of a developer being blocked because they run out of Azure credits for their proof of concept has a cost. All of those problem examples we mentioned earlier in this article have costs to the organization, it’s just that those costs don’t appear on your azure bill.

Our plan was to set up Turbo360 for the development teams and to allow them to take accountability for the use of the credits and not just simply use them. In this article we will show you how we did this.

What about Azure Cost Management?

Azure Cost Management is in Azure and is free. This is great but the reality is that Azure Cost Management has been available to all our developers since day 1. We still have the problems I mentioned earlier. This clearly shows there is an adoption issue there and also the DevOps teams cannot easily see the holistic views across all of the developers.

Solution

In this section we will walk through how we use Turbo360 to maximize the use of our Azure developer credits.

Getting Started

Getting started with Turbo360 is easy. In fact, there is a 10-minute video which walks you through how to get up and running.

https://docs.turbo360.com/v2/docs/en/cost-analyzer-quick-start

In our case we have all our Azure Credits for Visual Studio and MPN credits grouped under a specific management group, and we give Turbo360 access to the management group at that level.

Cost Grouping

Once Turbo360 has imported data for your subscriptions we then would allocate the subscriptions to folders within the tree view.

You can see below how I can group the developers for the following teams:

• Document360 developers
• Turbo360 developers
• BizTalk360 developers

To achieve this view, we used a feature in Turbo360 called “Auto Create Groups”. This allows us to assign a subscription to a team level folder and then Turbo360 will automatically create a sub-node on the tree in the background for the new subscription.

The net result here is that the DevOps team can manage at the folder level and individual developers can manage their own subscription.

Holistic view of Credit Usage

One of the challenges that we had in the DevOps team is that the DevOps owner cannot see holistically across all the developers in their area to see how people are doing.

In the Document360 – Developers folder the DevOps team can have some graphs and charts which let them see across all the subscriptions belonging to their developers.

Previously when a developer set up a subscription the DevOps team didn’t have any access to it at first and had no visibility to the credit usage. When they were given access, it was very difficult for them to get these cross-subscription views.

You can see below one of the tables we use where it simply shows each subscription and compares cost last month vs cost this month.

Who is using credits and who isn’t

The next question the DevOps team had is about who is and isn’t using credits. Your Visual Studio subscription purchases don’t all come with Azure credits. We want to ensure that developers are assigned the right kind of subscription.

When we moved from the Legacy Gold partner benefits to the Solution Designation benefits, we found that a lot of developers had been given a partner benefit that they just hadn’t been using.

In the table below we can see that some developers haven’t been using credits much so its possible this subscription could be reallocated to someone who would use it.

Visibility of Costs

The next question we want to help with is the visibility of cost. The DevOps team and Developers have indicated how this is not straightforward and intuitive for them to manage credit usage at both team and individual developer level.

Holistic Visibility of Cost

The DevOps team wanted to be able to look at costs across the entire team. You can see below a graph which looks across 27 subscriptions owned by Developers in one of the teams.

The standout points for this graph are:

• I can easily see what types of service we are using across all these 27 subscriptions
• There is quite a lot of cost for Virtual Machines, but it is not consistent. We might be able to optimize these, so we don’t use so many of the credits
• A lot of the costs are consistent each day, which is good

Individual Developer View of their costs

If we drop down a level from the DevOps team and want to look at individual developers, we need to help them get better transparency on their costs.

What Services is the Developer using

Below you can see an example graph showing the services used by an individual developer. Its easy for the developer to see where their credits are going.

Costs by Resource Group Last 6 Months

The below view is also useful for a developer showing then how much they are spending on each resource group each month and highlighting changes.

You can see below one of the standout items is that this month there is a spike in one of the resource groups.

Cost Review

As a developer or DevOps person we also want to be able to do a quick review of our costs. I want to ensure I am not wasting my credits.

With Turbo360 the DevOps team can do this across all subscriptions and the developer can do this just on their own subscription.

Below you can see a table comparing last month vs the previous month at service level. I can clearly see most of my costs are similar but there is an increase in Virtual Machine costs.

I can also group cost by individual resources and look for the resources that have changed by the most.

If I want to learn more about one of these resources I can click on it and open up a screen showing by a bunch of information about this resource.

There are different tabs with different views of this resource and, but I can dig into this one resource and see what is happening with the costs and if there are any recommendations I can follow.

Monitoring

The next challenge we have faced is to reduce the risk of developers running out of credit. On the tree view each developer can take ownership of their own subscription and can set up easy to maintain monitoring of their costs.

Group Budget

With the group budget the developer can configure a daily/weekly/monthly budget (with sub-thresholds) and send alerts to themselves if they are running out of credit. The below picture shows how easy it is to configure your threshold.

You can see this developer is within their threshold each month but when they start getting close to their credit threshold then they will hit the red line and trigger an alert.

Anomalies

Turbo360 also has anomaly detection. This means that each developer can get an early warning of a potential problem.

You can see below this developer’s day over day costs are not fluctuating much so there is no problem here.

Cost Optimization

We don’t want to waste credits by having overprovisioned resources. Turbo360 provides several ways it can help you keep on top of these.

Advisor Recommendations

Azure Advisor recommendations are in the Azure Portal but let’s be honest they are hidden away and in production scenarios people don’t keep an eye on them let alone your developer in their Dev subscription.

In the cost optimization section, we will make it easy for the developer to see recommendations they may be missing.

In the case below the developer could shrink the size of the Virtual Machine and save their credits.

In addition to the individual developer, the DevOps team can holistically look at these recommendations across all developers and provide accountability to those developers where needed.

Advanced Recommendations

Turbo360 also has advanced recommendations. Again, these can be viewed at the individual developer level or holistically across the team.

In the Basic Recommendations you could see above there were 4 recommendations from Azure Advisor saving $22 per month. Turbo360 had identified 144 recommendations which would save me $246 per month. That’s nearly 2 subscriptions worth of credits being wasted each month.

Turbo360 also contains features to help you evaluate these recommendations and execute them.

House Keeping

In addition to rightsizing Turbo360 has a house keeping feature called Other Recommendations.

This feature will execute around 20+ queries of your environment looking for waste and things you might be able to clean up or optimize.

In the picture below you can see the view for the DevOps team across the entire team. The view is also available for individual developers too.

In the picture you can see there are 9 app service plans with no apps on them. Some are free or dynamic plans but one of them is an S1 plan which costs money but there are no apps deployed to it. The developer probably cleaned up a demo but just didn’t realize they are still paying for this app service plan which has nothing on it.

Good housekeeping also keeps your environment clean and tidy to effectively use your credits and make it easy to keep the environment tidy.

Scheduling Resource Usage

The final feature we would like to talk about to help the developer is a feature in Turbo360 we call the scheduler.

The scenario here is that you use resources which are helping you to do a proof of concept, but you only work 9 to 5 so if you can shut stuff down and scale it down out of hours then you can save your credits and get more value out of them.

In the picture below you can see where the developer would configure their 9-to-5 schedule.

They would then add resources to them as shown below.

In this case I am adding an app service plan to scale up during the day and down at night as shown below.

I can also add scenarios like:

• Shut down my VM and turn it on in the morning
• Shrink the vCore or DTU of my SQL then scale it up in the morning
• And other scenarios

The aim here is to make it very easy for a developer with a couple of clicks, to be able to configure a job to do this automation. They don’t have to write DevOps pipelines or PowerShell scripts.

The outcome I am looking for is if I can scale down my demo App Service and SQL database in the evening then I can make my credits go more than twice as far.

What’s the ROI on this approach

We believe that for the development team the ROI comes in terms of:

• Time savings
• Risk reduction of running out of credits when you need them
• Effective use of credits and not wasting them

Summary

The outcome we were looking for was to empower developers to really own their Azure subscriptions and without needing to spend more than a few minutes on it, they can keep on top of costs, get proactive alerts and optimize making their credit go further.

Going beyond the individual developer we also enabled the DevOps team for each product to provide better governance over the use of subscription credits and to make sure we are maximizing the value we can get from them.

If you are an existing Turbo360 customer, then you are probably focusing on your overall production costs. This approach here can be a good opportunity for you to get more value from the product you already have and help your developers manage their own costs. This can also be a good step forward in developing your cost-focused culture.

If you are new to Turbo360, the beauty of the Turbo360 pricing model is that it can scale down to just a development team if you are looking to manage just your developers. In this way you can get enterprise level cost management capability at small scale. When your development team are hot on cost management through the empowerment Turbo360 gives then, this learning can just be scaled up to adopt similar practices within your other teams if you want to manage costs in other areas or across the entire organization. This is a bottom-up approach to keeping on top of costs rather than a top-down approach which often involves people at the front line not being involved. /p>