Credit: ID 141271826 © Topdeq | Dreamstime.com
After months of teasing its availability, Microsoft has released Azure Cost Management for partners that have onboarded their customers to the new Microsoft Customer Agreement.
Outlined in a blog post by Aparna Gopalakrishnan, senior programming manager of Azure Cost Management at Microsoft, the service allows for partners and their customers to be able to use Azure Cost Management tools to manage cloud spend in a similar fashion to pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and enterprise customers.
Gopalakrishnan said this would be the first periodic update to enable cost management support for partners.
In this update, cloud solution partners (CSP) are able to view invoiced costs, reconcile cost to an invoice and associate the cost to customers, subscriptions, resource groups and services, view and analyse Azure costs through the cost analysis feature and view resource costs that have Partner Earned Credit applied in cost analysis.
CSPs can also set up notifications and automation through programmatic budgets and alerts if costs go over a budget and allow for customers and resellers to view cost management data to analyse their services and set budgets to control costs at PAYG prices through the Azure resource manage policy.
Future updates will see cost recommendation and suggestion optimisation and showback features that allow for partners to charge markups on consumption costs, with the latter planned for 2020.
There is also a planned retail rate release of Azure Cost Management for users not on the Microsoft Customer Agreement and are supported by a CSP partner.
Mentioned previously by Microsoft in June as being for cloud solution providers rather than cloud solution partners, Azure Cost Management for partners was slated for an October release.
It was mentioned again in July, and then an update came in September that saw the release delayed to 1 November.
