Here are some recommended practices that can help you minimize your costs:

• Understand estimated costs before you deploy: Calculate your projected costs by using the Pricing calculator and the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator. Only add the products, services, and resources that you need for your solution.
• Use Azure Advisor to monitor your usage: Azure Advisor identifies unused or underutilized resources and recommends unused resources that you can remove. This information helps you configure your resources to match your actual workload.

• Use spending limits to restrict your spending: If you have a free trial or a credit-based Azure subscription, you can use spending limits to prevent accidental overrun.
• Use Azure Reservations to prepay: Azure Reservations offers discounted prices on certain Azure services. Azure Reservations can save you up to 72 percent as compared to pay-as-you-go prices. To receive a discount, you reserve services and resources by paying in advance.
• Choose low-cost locations and regions: The cost of Azure products, services, and resources can vary across locations and regions. If possible, you should use them in those locations and regions where they cost less.
• Research available cost-saving offers: Keep up to date with the latest Azure customer and subscription offers, and switch to offers that provide the greatest cost-saving benefit.
• Use Azure Cost Management + Billing to control spending: Azure Cost Management + Billing is a free service that helps you understand your Azure bill, manage your account and subscriptions, monitor and control Azure spending, and optimize resource use.
  • Reporting
  • Data enrichment
  • Budgets
  • Alerting
  • Recommendations

• Apply tags to identify cost owners: Tags help you manage costs associated with the different groups of Azure products and resources. You can apply tags to groups of Azure resources to organize billing data.
• Resize underutilized virtual machines: A common recommendation that you’ll find from Azure Cost Management + Billing and Azure Advisor is to resize or shut down VMs that are underutilized or idle.
• Deallocate virtual machines during off hours: Recall that to deallocate a VM means to no longer run the VM, but preserve the associated hard disks and data in Azure.
• Delete unused resources: Regularly review your environment, and work to identify these systems. Shutting down these systems can have a dual benefit by saving you on infrastructure costs and potential savings on licensing and operating costs.
• Migrate from IaaS to PaaS services: Over time, one way to reduce costs is to gradually move IaaS workloads to run on platform as a service (PaaS) services. While you can think of IaaS as direct access to compute infrastructure, PaaS provides ready-made development and deployment environments that are managed for you.
• Save on licensing costs: Many Azure services provide a choice of running on Windows or Linux. In some cases, the cost depends on which you choose.
• Use Azure Hybrid Benefit to repurpose software licenses on Azure: If you’ve purchased licenses for Windows Server or SQL Server, and your licenses are covered by Software Assurance, you might be able to repurpose those licenses on VMs on Azure.

References:

• Manage and minimize total cost on Azure

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