Speaker 1: 0:07

Hello, welcome to Microsoft Community In-Class Podcast, where we share insights from community experts to stay up to date in Microsoft. I'm Nicholas. I'll be your host today. In this episode we dive into the amazing cost of Microsoft. Before we get started, I want to remind you to post on social media so you never miss an episode and it helps us reach more amazing people like yourself today. We have a special guest in this episode called erlin hushfield. Could you please introduce yourself please?

Speaker 2: 0:37

thanks for having me, nicholas. Yeah, my name is erlin rushfeld.

Speaker 2: 0:40

You yeah, no no, you did pretty well, you did. But yeah, I work as a consultant manager at inner factor, which is a nordic company, uh, consultant company and um, yeah, I've been working there for almost two years now, started as a senior consultant and then this, uh, now in 2025, I've started as a manager. I have a small team at the cloud infrastructure team there. We're like seven people there, but we're in the cloud infrastructure. We're pretty big. So InnoFactor is Nordic consultancy, as I said, and we specialize in Microsoft technology. So a lot of Azure, a lot of Microsoft 365, a lot of security and yeah, Okay, so before we dive into the theme of this episode, can we just run through?

Speaker 1: 1:36

like what do you do day to day in your job?

Speaker 2: 1:40

Yeah, certainly. So normal day for me. I have a customer in Oslo where I live and I work as a consultant towards those or that customer and at the same time, I also have like a team that I take care of. They report to me and, yeah, on a day to day it's usually working with the customer, having standups with both internally with my cloud infrastructure colleagues, and also with the customer. I work a lot with infrastructure as code. I work a lot with cost optimization. It's becoming a big field in a lot of customers right now and in Norway we're seeing a lot of demand for especially cost optimization, seeing a lot of demand for especially cost optimization. And yeah, you see it, or it has become quite big in like not only how do we do it in a good way, but also like more and more services are brought in by microsoft and pricing can get so complicated. So a lot of the time is just sitting down and looking through the documentation of mic, microsoft, of how are we actually paying for this kind of things.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Because I remember having a conversation backstage and you said you tend to focus now on customization. So what inspired you to focus on that area in the cloud?

Speaker 2: 3:02

Yeah, so it was actually in a previous employee I had. I was also working as a consultant and I didn't have much like projects at the time. So I was starting to think like how can I start to make my own work? How can I create a offering for our customers that will create work for me? So for me it was like either I can go in and check out security but we had a ton of security people already, so it wouldn't be that big.

Speaker 2: 3:32

And then the next part was cost optimization. We had very high demand for cost optimization from our customers and it started kind of small, like okay, we have this one storage account that we're having and it's costing us several 1000s per month. How can we like optimize this specific resource? And then it just came so much more like okay, so here's how we optimize storage, here's how we optimize compute VMs, how do we optimize app services. And the ball just kept on rolling and rolling.

Speaker 2: 4:05

And then I created a service offering which was basically just a PowerShell script that went through the entire Azure environment and all these experiences that I've learned, like how do I optimize these things? The script was running through environments, just checking all these things and then exporting to an Excel which I just went through manually and created a report for the customer and it worked perfectly super simple. But at that time, at least in Norway, cost optimization wasn't that known. It was like how can we do this? Like we have gone to the cloud. They said it was going to be cheaper. We're now seeing like these huge bills coming still really giving like working with customization because so many customers value it. Of course they value money, but it's like again and again it comes up that they need help with it.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Yeah, because I know that you can't really do it on production data, but you can do it on other environment like development dev. But you can do it in other environments like development dev, even though InstaFact stay on 24 hours outside. When you can pull PowerShell script to shut down within such a period and do only one way you need and only optimize only the workload that you need on prod, so you save quite a bit of money from those. So one of the questions that I want to ask you is how, in your experience of, in your role, what are some of the common mistakes that you find when, when managing costs for, like azure itself, microsoft?

Speaker 2: 5:57

yeah, so like the number one that I find is like firstly, over-provisioned compute resources, like people will set up VMs if they migrated them from on-prem, like one-to-one, from what we have on-prem with CPU cores and RAM, and they don't like continuously check it. Are we actually utilizing this or is it just standing there running? Same goes for app services this or is it just standing there running? Same goes for app services. People are running far too big app services than they're actually needing. They're not utilizing like the benefit of that. You can scale up and down when you need it. They have just set up like static resources like here's the SKU we're using, we're just going to use.

Speaker 2: 6:41

The second most like common I've found is how I'm going to call it like orphaned resources or zombie resources. It's resources that have been set up once and then maybe forgotten. Like if you were doing Azure before 2022, I think it was like if you had a VM and you deleted the VM, it wouldn't automatically delete the disks and network interface card and a public IP and those would just lie there for years. Basically, you have resources that you're not using and we can tell, because it's not connected to a resource, that it's dependent on A public ip that is not connected to a network card or to abm it, it's not really used like there are some exceptions, but you have like costs laying there yeah, that's like wasting money, so it's an unutilized cash.

Speaker 2: 7:40

You're giving microsoft money for something that you have forgotten. You had resources that you no longer need and it's just lying there. And another thing, like when you're a consultant and you might do one project with customer and then you leave and then you come back again for another project in like one or two years. Then I have experienced it myself. Like I found resources that I have set up and I know like this was not supposed to lie around.

Speaker 2: 8:09

This is we were done with this like test resource or whatever it was, and it's like it's been two years since that. It's still lying there, having a cost every single month and VMs running when, yeah, I hadn't been logged into this customer for two years. That's like that was a strange thing. Like when I started creating this service, offering for cost optimization, is that okay, we can go to our customers, but we have like created their Azure environment. We came there as the consultants doing the job and now we're coming two years later and telling them like yeah, we, I was about to say we did something wrong. Here's an optimized way and you have to like go and control yourself, going out and either saying like oh, your colleague or my colleague as consultant.

Speaker 2: 9:06

He came here and what he set up wasn't optimized for customization and we had like find somewhere like where we were humble enough and it created some internal frictions, if I said like you come for to a customer and they have, like this consultant who has been there for several years and you knowing he's your colleague, he's a good guy and then you have to go and tell his customer like, oh, here's something that my colleague has forgotten to delete and it's costing you several thousands in the last few years. It's, it's not easy.

Speaker 1: 9:45

Yeah, cause I think that in that case you would just have a process where it was just a done process every night in case people forget to delete it. It would just go through everything and delete.

Speaker 2: 9:56

Yeah, so in a way, I think a cost optimization would fit perfectly with governance, as in agile policies, because you can tighten the guardrail of what people can deploy school-wise or app service, or yeah yeah, yeah, like one way that I like to think about customization is that we can learn a lot from uh security, because security is a field in it that has been going on for way longer than we have been in the cloud. And, if you like, look at some of the five things that security does really good like. First, you start out by mapping your environment, like start simple, like what am I actually spending here? What are my resources? Which resources are cost me the most? And then see if you find anything that's not in use anymore. And then, when you have mapped everything out, you can go over to monitoring your costs, check like you're monitoring for compute. Can you scale down something? Can you use auto-scaling instead? Can you use the different SKU for first of all, for example, for VMs? Do you utilize our storage and, most importantly, set budgets for your azure subscription. It's so easy to set up a budget and you get notifications if you're actually like going over how much you want to spend, and some people who don't set up might get a nasty surprise and Microsoft might not give you a refund if you ask for it. And then, after you've gone through monitoring, you start by a very important thing in FinOps foundation and the FinOps principles is that you need to make people responsible for the costs. Like in the previous company that I worked with, there was a saying like we're all working with security because everyone needs to be responsible for every day, like everything they do in their job they need to make sure that it's actually secure. If you do that for costs as well like make everyone aware, like we're all responsible for Azure cost, either if it is choosing the right SKU when we're deploying something new or going back and checking can we optimize this. So that's really important.

Speaker 2: 12:18

And another point that we can learn from security is like limits, limitations, like you talked about with Azure policies, setting policy like you would in security. An example from security could be like we want to block with policy that no one can actually go into an NSG and open up RDP or SSH directly from the internet and in on a public IP. We don't want that. Or we use conditional access to limit where users can log up. And you can take that same way into cost optimization by using, for example, azure Policy and say, like well, here's the few SKUs or chosen amount of SKUs that you can actually use for your environment. Here's some specific resources that you can use and you can automate this, like saying you're not allowed to, but you can send in a service request and we can create an exemption for you, but of course you're going to be responsible. Or you can use Azure Policy to enforce tags, say that you need to have a cost center tag, for example, so that we know which cost center we're going to charge back the cost for that resource, and those are really good.

Speaker 2: 13:37

And the last point that we can learn from security is to create a culture. If you create a culture where everyone is aware of cost, you have educational programs for your employees like here's how cost works, you empower them to actually both do their designs right, to have good costs and also give them the tools to optimize. And when you empower those, you create a good cost optimization culture. But then again you need to have it up. A good optimization culture, but then again you need to have it anchored into the management to get it from up and down. Often it is from IT going okay, we need to optimize, and when you go to the developer team they're like no, but we need to have this virtual machine running 24-7 or we can't scale down this one because we need to have this virtual machine running 24 7. Or we can't scale down this one because we need x amount of gigs of ram, even though the monitor might say otherwise.

Speaker 2: 14:37

So, uh, yeah it's hard, but if you create a good culture for it, it gets a lot simpler to actually get those cost optimizations yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:47

So lots of time when you're doing like poc with the clients, like the top clients in charge, you can just run something and you can tell them a rough estimate of what it would say for a year and then, before they approve the process that you can do and then you just test it against any dev environment. So another thing that got my mind is that what are some of the challenges do you think everyone would have when dealing with costs, whether it's managing third party, like separate finops, person in the client side, or just or just like everyone learning know about costs? So what are some of the challenges you think?

Speaker 2: 15:31

Yeah, it's definitely knowledge. It is like people see just a huge bill coming in and it all seems so big. And of course it is big. You can have thousands of different resources and it's resource group and subscriptions and you're sitting there just seeing like the top five services and it just seems so large to actually go in and look at it. But if you start breaking it down into like smaller pieces it gets simpler to actually get into it. But I agree it can be very, very intimidating to look at just your bill from Azure and look like how am I going to optimize this Azure cost management tool? It's getting really good right now. Microsoft are making some great improvements. It's getting easier and easier to actually dive down into your cost?

Speaker 1: 16:28

Yeah, because I noticed, for example, aks Kubernetes. They have cost analysis built in so you can actually see from each of their namespaces as well. So instead of drilling in the cost management portal, I think Microsoft is drilling more into cost as well. For each of the resources it's easy to identify.

Speaker 2: 16:51

Yeah, it is like Microsoft, they're part of the FinOps Foundation. So, yeah, finops Foundation is a part of, or it is a open source, like the Linux Foundation, where they want to create frameworks and trainings for everyone. So it's cloud native and Microsoft go in there for Azure, of course, and they listen to, well, finops experts and how they're doing. They're looking at the framework that they're creating and then they're going like, okay, how can we implement it easier into our platform, azure, to actually help people optimize and get control of their costs? The last few years, marksoft has done lots of improvements and it's going real well, like, for example, co-pilot for azure. If you that you can ask that question about your costs. It has varied results, but sometimes it gives you a real good.

Speaker 1: 17:56

Yeah, so do you normally. When you do a piece of work with a client, do you normally just consider costing any of your like, for example, any of your work you've done, so have it in a peace of mind, like if it's going to cost you that much what you could save, yeah, mostly like with my current client.

Speaker 2: 18:15

I always have like discussions with our tech lead which is like, okay, we're doing an APIM instance now in test environment, which SKU should we use? And then we look both that, okay, what are our requirements, what services do we need, what features do we need? And then we look back at the SKU, trying to get it as like low as possible and cheap as possible. Sku and Microsoft. Really, I would say that they want you to think like that. If you look at the ASET 305, which is the Azure certification for architect infrastructure solutions, a lot of the questions are like here's a scenario and here's like the technical requirements. Which skew should you choose? Which will give you, uh, the lowest cost? And I also saw that in, uh, the aset 700, the network engineer. So marksoft are putting these into their certification and the exams because they want you to think like that.

Speaker 2: 19:29

You need to not over provision and choose the premium SKU. Sometimes you need that because Microsoft also puts the best security into the premium SKU. So if you need, for example, private endpoints and VNet injection or integration, you need to choose the premium SKUs. And they're getting better at it. More and more services are getting those features in the cheaper SKUs and I love it. So thank you, microsoft. The last one now was that I saw API management again Standard V2 that has VNet integration and private endpoint now. So I'll definitely look into that, because that's like half the cost of the premium SKU. So yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:17

So if you, as this episode is coming to an end, if you were to give one piece of advice to customers and partners that work with Microsoft about cost management, what would you say?

Speaker 2: 20:32

Don't be afraid to actually dive into the cost and start small. Look at the Azure pricing and then just try to figure out how it actually works and use Azure cost management.

Speaker 1: 20:45

figure out how it actually works and use Azure cost management. Okay, how can some other people learn more about cost management? Azure cost management, yeah. To learn more.

Speaker 2: 20:55

Yeah, so if you want to go at the big picture, finopsorg, which is the FinOps foundation they have good frameworks and a lot of free documentation and educational texts that you can read. You can also do certifications through them, the FinOps Foundation and it is possible there to join the foundation and talk with other people that are doing this. Other than that, microsoft documentation all services has a pricing pool and a lot of services also have a cost optimization documentation. That's because Microsoft has the well-architected framework and one of the pillars in the well-architected framework is cost optimization. So a lot of documentation on different services will have something about how you can optimize the costs.

Speaker 1: 21:51

Okay, great, so we'd love to learn about our guests. So are you going to any further events? Are you going to any events talking about costs?

Speaker 2: 22:05

Yeah, actually I'm going to the european ai and cloud summit in may in uh, germany, and uh I'm also going to talk about cost optimization there.

Speaker 1: 22:16

So um, yeah, okay, so you're trying to influence costs in everyone's life and trying to get started.

Speaker 2: 22:23

Yeah yeah, it's uh. It's what I love doing about my job.

Speaker 1: 22:29

It's uh my favorite subject in africa so, aside from your day job as a consultant, uh, what do you like to do? Do you have any hobbies?

Speaker 2: 22:41

oh, yeah, yeah I I go to a lot of concerts, music concerts. Metal, I love metal and I also do a lot of volunteer work, so in the community and at festivals also.

Speaker 1: 22:54

Yeah, Do you like mentoring stuff?

Speaker 2: 22:59

Or is it just like I do mentoring inside my own company at least? Yeah, that's good, but I haven't really gotten the opportunity to do mentoring externally, but maybe someday yeah, you can even mentor anyone with it.

Speaker 1: 23:13

It doesn't need to be, it could be anyone in your company, but you do it externally, as in in your own time, when you both of them, yeah, available. That's it okay. So thanks for joining this episode, erlin. Uh, hope I said it correctly. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you and hope everyone learned some bit about cost optimization from you. Thank you, bye.