Category: Cloud

John Morehouse breaks out the envelopes:

When organizations migrate workloads to Azure, the focus is usually on architecture, performance, and security. Cost management should be part of that conversation—but in practice, it’s often treated as an afterthought. One of the most overlooked and underutilized tools in Azure is Budgets, despite the fact that it can prevent unpleasant billing surprises with minimal effort.

Azure budgeting is useful but not great. I think it relies too much on messaging without enough teeth, so that requires setting up runbooks and humans constantly reacting rather than being able to set stronger rules around scaling down resources prior to getting that unexpected and unwelcome surprise bill.

Kendra Little hits a pain point:

Microsoft recently announced that Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-gen General Purpose (GPv2) is now generally available. GPv2 brings significant storage performance improvements over GPv1, and if you’re using GPv1, you should plan to upgrade.

But GPv2 still has the same memory-to-core ratio problem that makes Managed Instance a rough deal for running SQL Server. SQL Server is engineered to use lots of memory—it’s a rare OLTP or mixed-OLTP workload that doesn’t need significant cache for reliable performance. We’ll have a look at the pricing math.

Read on for Kendra’s detailed thoughts on GPv2 versus GPv1 and also how GPv2 still has its warts.

Andy Brownsword glues together a few resources:

Not all pipelines in Azure have native options for sending emails. The lucky Fabric folks have an Office 365 connection ready to rock. Data Factory and Synapse don’t have email capability built-in and need another option to send messages. So for everyone who wants more emails for their inbox rules to handle (delete), we’ll build and call a Logic App.

For this example we’ll have basic email parameters – To, Subject, Body – along with an optional attachment from a storage account. Also note that I’ve left all actions with their default names – if you change them make sure to update expressions accordingly.

Read on to see how it all works.