Michael Flanakin gives us a few updates on Azure billing:
Understanding your cost patterns over time and investigating specific charges often requires drilling into and selecting specific dates. You’ve always been able to select from one day up to one year in cost analysis, but you’ve told us that selecting those dates isn’t as easy as it could be. As we started building out a new platform for analytics and insights, we took this feedback to heart and completely redesigned the date selection. What you see today is an early peek at that.
This month, you’ll find a new option to select a custom date range in the cost analysis preview. You can pick a single month, a range of months, or start and end dates for a range of days, making it easier than ever to fine-tune your reporting to the dates you need.
The virtue and downfall of cloud systems like AWS and Azure is that they’re very clear about how much things cost, but only if you know exactly the resources something uses. It’s not as simple as “I want to use a database,” but there are all of those other charges around data egress, networking, log management, etc. which can add up. Many of those costs are negligible (fortunately), but try walking through a pricing scenario for Azure Synapse Analytics sometime with someone new to the product and figure out at what point that person gives up trying to calculate the cost. My money says right around the time you get to the integration runtime costs.