Albert McQuiston shares some advice:
Organizations using Azure Cloud services often overspend, eventually decreasing their operational efficiency. Leveraging cost-optimization techniques can help these businesses to focus on areas requiring more capital investment.
There are a few tips around specific actions you can take to understand why you’re spending so much and how to cut it down a bit. Albert also mentions but does not share a link to the Azure pricing calculator. This is a great tool if you already know what Azure resources you need and intend to price them out. It’s a real challenge getting the number close enough to right (especially for complex services with a lot of inputs, like Azure Synapse Analytics was), but can be useful in getting in the ballpark. But I also highly recommend going through a Well-Architected Review assessment, based on Azure’s Well-Architected Framework. This framework and its associated reviews cover cost-effectiveness as a key tenet.