The Cost (List) metric can be used throughout Cloudability to represent costs at the public on-demand, or “retail” rate. Adding to the existing support for Amazon spend, we also support Azure Compute and Azure Database spend.

The Cost (List) metric is useful as it represents each cost item as though it wasn’t impacted by custom pricing agreements, commitments (such as reserved instances) or spot pricing. This can help delivery teams and engineers - who often can't influence discounts or commitment coverage - to have consistency in cloud pricing, which not only makes financial planning easier but allows them to measure the impact of their efficiency initiatives. The Cost (List) metric is also useful to the Cloud Centre of Excellence as it can be used alongside other cost metrics to quantify exact savings figures. One notable thing about Azure billing is that, unlike AWS, usage is always represented with custom pricing already applied. This launch is therefore significant for the fact customers will be able to experience Azure costs sans custom pricing for the first time. Another difference is that Azure billing exports currently have no attribute that corresponds to the public on-demand rate, meaning our implementation relies entirely on integrating with Azure’s price sheets. Over the coming months we will add Cost (List) support for additional Azure services.

 Figure 1: Example cost report showing Cost (List) with Azure Spend

We automatically update Cost (List) data for Azure spend back to January 1st, 2022. If you would like this done for additional historical data, reach out to your account team or TAM to have a reprocess completed. Additional points regarding this release:

• Any tiered usage pricing (typically for storage based on amount stored) assumes the lowest tier (highest cost) for the purpose of calculating Cost (List). This means the effects of bulk usage discounts are removed.
• Azure price sheets are primarily provided in US dollars, whereas billing exports are provided in the local currency. It was important for us to make Cost (List) work consistently in the local currency. While the price sheets can be obtained in other currencies, the result is based on the current month exchange rate only. To be able accurately represent Cost (List) for historical months we are pulling the relevant monthly exchange rates from https://openexchangerates.org/.