Microsoft's mission to migrate 90% of internal IT to the Azure cloud

Having been told to reduce its infrastructure spend, Microsoft IT achieved a 38 percent reduction in cloud spending and expects to hit its goal by budget reporting time.

The stats are impressive, including a rise in CPU utilisation from 4.5 percent average to 16 percent average CPU utilisation across Azure IaaS instances. Microsoft also decreased the number of operating system instances by more than 20,000.

To manage its vast IaaS footprint, Microsoft's internal IT teams created Azure Resource Optimisation (ARO), a combination of tools, processes and education that allowed them to analyse total cost of cloud resources and identify underutilised assets.

ARO evaluates the cost-effectiveness of everything from virtual machines to SQL databases, PaaS and unused Azure storage. By identifying issues such as underutilised servers, misconfigured resources and other unused resources, ARO offers recommendations such as adjusting SKU size, deleting unused resources or turning off resources during downtime.

The IT teams have a "cultural focus on optimisation" and review the ARO dashboard on a weekly basis. They "drill down" into ARO data, switching off or killing virtual machines in real-time. The dashboard then updates with the new, reduced cost.

"Watching the benefit of reducing core counts and resource types in near real time provides a great benefit to teams that are trying to stay within their budgets."

Microsoft has shared its learnings on how to optimise Azure consumption, starting by identifying poorly utilised servers.

"The ARO team monitors on-premises data centres and Azure virtual servers daily, using performance counters from System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). Processor, memory and hard drive data is gathered, and then the team uses industry-standard P95 values to determine whether specific assets are underutilised.

"We categorise all servers into five performance categories: frozen, cold, warm, hot and on fire. Teams often use hardware that’s much larger than needed, which leads to very low utilisation. Part of the ARO program is designed to educate engineering organisations about the cost associated with picking server sizes that are too large."

The blog posts outlines further detail on making best use of Azure resources by collecting performance data, creating recommendations and continuing to review metrics to ensure the best configuration and cost.

Microsoft recommends a number of tools to keep on top of Azure, including its own ARO dashboard, as well as Cloud Cruiser, a third-party system that was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise just a few days after the Microsoft blog went live.

Other tools include Snooze, which turns off non-production servers when employees are not actively working on them, as well as Resize, which does what it says on the tin – changes the size of an Azure server, dropping the size and cost of a VM.