Right-size your Azure compute
Right-size and consolidate VMs, SQL, App Service, AKS and Cosmos to match real usage.
Lessons in this path
- 1 Cost AZURE
Choose Cosmos DB serverless for bursty low-traffic workloads
One capacity decision per Azure Cosmos DB account: when traffic is intermittent and the average sits far below the peak, consumption billing stops you paying around the clock for throughput you only touch for minutes a day.
14 min - 2 Cost AZURE
Deallocate idle and underutilised virtual machines
One capability across the whole fleet: find the virtual machines that sit near-idle or oversized, then deallocate, resize or schedule them so you stop paying for compute you never use, without breaking the workloads you do.
14 min - 3 Cost AZURE
Move spiky VMs to burstable B-series SKUs
One capability across your VM and scale-set estate: find the machines that sit nearly idle most of the time but occasionally spike, and move them onto burstable B-series SKUs so you pay for the baseline you actually use instead of a full-time core you do not.
14 min - 4 Cost AZURE
Right-size AKS pods with the Vertical Pod Autoscaler
One capability across every workload on a cluster: find the pods whose CPU and memory requests are far larger than what they actually use, then let the Vertical Pod Autoscaler tell you the right numbers, so the nodes you pay for are sized to real demand instead of guesses.
14 min - 5 Cost AZURE
Right-size underutilised App Service plans
One capability across every web app, API and function host: make sure no App Service plan is paying for a SKU far larger than its workload actually uses, so the compute you buy matches the compute you run.
14 min - 6 Cost AZURE
Right-size Azure Cosmos DB throughput with autoscale
One capability across every Cosmos DB database and container: stop paying for a fixed ceiling of request units around the clock when the workload only needs them at peak, by letting autoscale scale the RU/s down when traffic falls.
14 min - 7 Cost AZURE
Right-size underutilised Azure Database for MySQL servers
Azure Advisor flags MySQL servers that have run cold for a week and recommends halving their compute. This lesson turns that one cost recommendation into a repeatable habit: find the over-provisioned servers, prove they are genuinely idle, and scale them down without taking an outage you did not plan for.
13 min - 8 Cost AZURE
Right-size underutilised Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers
One capability for the managed database bill: find every Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server that has sat underutilised for weeks, and drop its compute tier or vCore count to the size the workload actually needs, so you stop paying for cores that never run.
14 min - 9 Cost AZURE
Right-size over-provisioned Azure SQL Database compute
One capability across single databases, elastic pools and Managed Instance: find every database whose sustained DTU or vCore utilisation sits well below the tier it is paying for, and scale the compute down to fit the real workload without breaking it.
14 min - 10 Cost AZURE
Right-size or shut down underutilised virtual machines
One capability across every VM and scale set in the estate: find the machines that are paid for around the clock but barely used, then resize them to a smaller SKU or shut them down, so the Azure bill matches the work actually being done.
14 min - 11 Cost AZURE
Right-size or shut down underutilised VM scale sets
One capability for VM scale sets: find the ones whose instances run far below the SKU and instance count they are paying for, then resize the SKU, reduce the instance count, or shut the idle ones down, so the bill matches the load you actually carry.
14 min - 12 Cost AZURE
Tune the AKS cluster autoscaler for rapid scale-down
One change to a cluster-wide profile: stop paying for AKS nodes that emptied out minutes ago. By default a node has to sit unneeded for ten minutes before the autoscaler removes it, and scale-down pauses for ten minutes after every scale-up. Tighten those timers and you stop renting idle compute you are not using.
14 min - 13 Cost AZURE
Run interruptible AKS workloads on Spot node pools
One capability across every AKS cluster: move the workloads that tolerate interruption, batch jobs, CI runners, dev and test, off pay-as-you-go nodes and onto Azure Spot node pools that buy spare capacity at a deep discount, without putting anything that cannot survive an eviction at risk.
14 min