Azure FinOps Essentials

Hi there, and welcome to this week’s edition of Azure FinOps Essentials! 🎉

This week’s edition is a bit different — it’s sponsored by a product I think deserves your attention.

We often focus on usage optimization in FinOps: cleaning up waste, autoscaling, right-sizing, and choosing the right services. But cloud cost is always a simple formula: usage × rate. And while usage gets a lot of love, optimizing the rate, through commitments like reservations and savings plans, is where major savings hide.

But committing to multi-year plans can be risky, especially when your cloud usage shifts. What if you could get better rates without locking yourself in?

That’s exactly where Archera comes in. They offer 30-day, insured commitment plans that give you flexibility, guaranteed savings, and protection against forecast errors — all wrapped in a FinOps-first platform.

Let’s take a look at how Archera simplifies rate optimization and helps you save with confidence.

Cheers, Michiel

From DevOps to FinOps: A Personal Shift

I’ve been a software developer for over 20 years, building and deploying applications across industries, teams, and tech stacks. When the shift from traditional data centers to cloud infrastructure started, my focus was squarely on DevOps — automating deployments, improving reliability, and shortening feedback loops. Cost wasn’t part of the conversation. We cared about uptime and throughput, not euros per vCPU.

That changed a few years ago when I worked on a project as a consultant at Xebia. A customer asked the deceptively simple question: “Are we cost-effective in the cloud?” The answer, of course, was no, not because they were careless, but because trade-offs had been made along the way. Like many, they had optimized for speed and scale, or developer productivity, but not always cost.

That question sparked my interest in FinOps, especially in the areas where engineering teams can directly influence usage: reducing waste, resizing resources, and improving scaling logic. These are impactful levers, and developers should absolutely use them.

But there’s another side to cloud cost: the rate you pay. And that’s where commitments, discounts, and pricing models come in. Even with optimized usage, you’re leaving money on the table if you ignore the pricing layer.

This edition dives into that side of FinOps and looks at how Archera helps you approach it with confidence, flexibility, and automation.

Beyond usage: why rate optimization matters

At its core, cloud cost is just a simple equation: usage × rate.

I’ve written extensively about usage optimization: cutting cloud waste, resizing resources, and scaling intelligently. But there’s another lever that often gets less attention: the rate you’re paying.

Rate optimization is all about reducing your price per unit. Instead of sticking with the default pay-as-you-go model, you commit to using resources or spending a certain amount, and in return, you get a discount. In Azure, this comes in two forms:

• Reservations: Commit to specific compute SKUs, sizes, and regions, and save up to 72%.

• Savings Plans: Commit to a spend amount (not tied to specific SKUs) and save up to 65%.

Reservations give you deeper discounts, but they’re more rigid. Savings plans are more flexible, but offer slightly smaller savings. Either way, you’re trading commitment for lower prices.

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Not always.

Deciding how much to commit and for how long can be risky. The moment you overcommit, you start paying for unused capacity. And when these decisions are made centrally by a FinOps team, it gets even harder to match commitments to real, fluctuating usage.

Microsoft helps with Cost Advisor recommendations, but those still lock you into 1- or 3-year terms. What if you want to commit for just 30 days instead?

That’s exactly the flexibility Archera brings to the table, helping you unlock discounted rates without long-term lock-in or guesswork.

How Archera helps you optimize rates with flexibility and confidence

Archera approaches the rate optimization challenge in a refreshing way. The platform has been operating for years, first on AWS and now fully supporting Azure, with a focus on simplifying commitments while giving teams the confidence to act.

Getting started is simple: you create an account for free, connect your billing account or subscriptions, and let Archera ingest usage data. From there, it provides immediate visibility into your current reservations, usage patterns, and missed opportunities, all without charging anything for scanning, forecasting, or recommendations.

What makes Archera stand out is its flexible commitment model. Traditional Azure commitments lock you into 1- or 3-year plans. Archera, on the other hand, lets you opt into as short as 30-day commitments with their Guaranteed Reserved Instances (GRIs) and Guaranteed Savings Plans (GSPs).

These insured commitments come with a premium, which is only charged if you actually save money, applied directly through the Azure Marketplace, so the cost appears on your cloud bill. If, after the minimum term, the commitment didn’t result in savings, Archera automatically reimburses the net difference. That’s their MoneyBack Guarantee in action. You can also automate reapplying these 30-day commitments, ensuring you continuously benefit from potential savings without manual effort.

If you prefer to stick to Microsoft’s native discounts, Archera also allows you to buy Azure Savings Plans directly through the platform, again, without charging any markup or fee.

The platform supports a wide range of Azure services: from common workloads like Virtual Machines, App Services, SQL Databases, and Container Apps, to more specialized services such as Azure Databricks, Cognitive Services, and Storage Accounts. Commitments made through Archera are yours; they appear directly on your Azure invoice.

Archera also brings long-term forecasting and scenario modeling into your FinOps workflow. You can simulate growth patterns, evaluate the financial impact of upcoming changes, and model commitment strategies to align with future plans. Their automation tools let you define policies (e.g., “automate low-risk 30-day plans on staging environments”) while still maintaining oversight. And if you need help? Dedicated FinOps and Customer Success support is included at no cost.

In short, Archera gives you confidence, flexibility, and control. You choose what to commit to, how long to commit, and when to automate with the assurance that if something doesn’t save you money, you’re protected.

Final thoughts

Archera is a focused FinOps SaaS platform with one clear mission: to help you reduce your cloud spend through short-term, insured savings plans and reservations. It doesn’t try to be everything. Instead, it goes deep on one of the most impactful levers in FinOps: rate optimization.

If you expect your setup to remain relatively stable over time, Archera’s 30-day commitment plans are hard to ignore. Once you pass the break-even point (typically around 22–24 days), the savings start adding up, even after the small insurance premium.

And if things unexpectedly change and you don’t fully utilize the commitment? The MoneyBack guarantee kicks in automatically, no forms or follow-ups required.

Explore more or sign up for a free account here:

👉 https://www.archera.ai/azure-cost-management

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