Azure spend is exploding — second only to AWS in customer audits we run. This guide is the 12-pattern playbook for cutting Azure bills, with concrete portal paths, az CLI snippets, and impact estimates.
1-year reservations for predictable VMs (D-series, B-series). Cancel anytime with 12% fee. Lower commitment than AWS RIs.
If you have an Enterprise Agreement with Software Assurance, BYO Windows licenses to Azure VMs. Most teams forget to enable.
Azure Advisor → Cost recommendations. Surfaces underutilized VMs with 1-click resize.
CI/CD agents, dev/test, batch ML training. Eviction ≤30s notice — design for restart-tolerance.
Azure DevTest Labs has built-in scheduled shutdown. Or set Azure Automation Runbooks. 8h on, 16h off = 67% savings.
Lifecycle management policies on Storage Accounts: Hot → Cool at 30d, → Archive at 180d.
Multiple SQL DBs with spiky-but-uncorrelated load → consolidate into an elastic pool. Pay for the pool, not each DB.
Cluster autoscaler with `--scale-down-delay-after-add=10m`. Dev clusters on B-series (burstable) instead of D-series.
Per-subscription budgets with Logic App action group that auto-pauses non-prod resources at 90% threshold.
`az network public-ip list --query "[?ipConfiguration==null]"` finds unattached IPs. Bulk delete.
Premium SSD v2 has independent IOPS/throughput sliders — most disks are over-provisioned. v2 lets you pay for what you actually use.
Azure Policy: `Require a tag and its value on resources`. Block deployment without `owner`, `costCenter`, `env`.
CARTIE AI runs all 12 patterns against your Azure subscription. Read-only Reader role, no agents.
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