Azure FinOps Essentials

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

This time, we’re diving into a subtle but expensive topic: high availability.

In cloud architecture, it’s easy to default to zone redundancy, failovers, and active-active deployments for every workload. After all, who doesn’t want resilience?

But as you’ll see in this edition, always-on availability comes at a cost, and not all services actually need it. I’ll explore how to make smarter availability choices in Azure, when to scale down complexity, and how this ties directly to your FinOps mindset.

Let’s move from “available by default” to “available with purpose.”

Cheers,

Michiel

The True Cost of Always-On Availability

When teams move to the cloud, there’s an assumption that everything should be highly available by default. Azure makes it easy to deploy across availability zones, add traffic failover, or run active-active workloads in multiple regions. So we do.

But high availability is never free.

Every extra nine in uptime usually comes with extra architecture. You pay for:

• Redundant virtual machines running in multiple zones

• Load balancers that sit idle most of the time

• Replication and failover systems that rarely get tested

• Premium SKUs required for zone redundancy

• Storage replication across regions that may never be used

This leads to a situation where you’re often doubling infrastructure cost for a theoretical failure. And worse, you may be applying the same HA strategy to every workload without considering what actually needs that level of resilience.

I’ve seen environments where low-priority internal tools were given the same zone-redundant, load-balanced footprint as customer-facing APIs. Nobody questioned it. It was just “how we do things in Azure.”

But if you’re treating everything as critical, then nothing really is.

Rethinking Availability as a Business Metric

FinOps encourages us to align technical decisions with business value. Uptime is no different.

Rather than assuming maximum availability, the question should be: how much is enough?

A few prompts to consider:

• What happens if this service is down for 15 minutes? For an hour?

• Is there a financial penalty tied to downtime?

• Would users even notice a short disruption, or can they retry later?

• How frequently has this service actually failed in production?

Your answers will vary per workload. A B2B API with SLA requirements has different needs than a staging environment for internal testing. A marketing campaign site does not need the same architecture as an order processing system.

Once you start thinking in impact rather than principles, your cloud architecture becomes more cost-aware and aligned with user needs.

Availability should never be a checkbox. It should be a conscious tradeoff.

Availability Patterns in Azure that Scale with Purpose

Azure provides plenty of architectural options to right-size availability. The trick is knowing when to use them.

Here are a few examples:

• Zone Redundancy: Many services, such as Azure App Service or Azure SQL, allow for zone redundancy, but it can significantly increase cost. For internal tools or non-critical APIs, it may be better to stick with single-zone deployments.

• Platform-based Resilience: Use Azure Functions on the consumption plan for workloads that don’t need persistent infrastructure. Let the platform worry about reliability.

• Active-Passive Failover: Instead of duplicating workloads across regions, consider queuing mechanisms like Azure Service Bus or Storage Queues. Incoming events are buffered and can be processed when the consumer comes back online.

• Autoscaling and Scale-to-Zero: Azure Container Apps or Kubernetes-based setups can help you avoid idle resource costs. You only pay when something is running.

• Front Door and Traffic Manager: These give you global failover capabilities. Useful for critical external services, but not needed for everything.

• Backup Strategies: Make sure your data is protected, but don’t treat every app as mission critical. Sometimes, restoring from backup is good enough.

Ultimately, high availability should be applied with intent. Not every outage is catastrophic, and not every app needs a 99.99 percent SLA.

Smart Availability Starts with Better Questions

Cloud cost is still usage times rate. With always-on architecture, the usage part silently multiplies in the name of resilience.

From a FinOps perspective, the challenge is not to avoid availability. It is to make it meaningful.

If a system needs five-nines, build for it. But don’t give every service a platinum-grade setup just because you can. That is where cost overruns hide and where simplicity dies.

This is the essence of FinOps. You want to spend money where it creates value. That means:

• Rethinking blanket HA strategies

• Designing for graceful degradation

• Aligning engineering patterns with the actual needs of the business

Availability is not free. But thoughtful availability is worth every cent.

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Want more FinOps news? have a look at FinOps Weekly by Victor Garcia