Azure Cost Analysis tool - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Azure Cost Analysis Tool

📖 Scenario: You are managing cloud expenses for a small company using Microsoft Azure. To keep track of costs, you want to build a simple Azure Cost Analysis tool that helps you see the spending per service.

🎯 Goal: Create a basic Azure Cost Analysis tool that stores cost data for different Azure services, sets a budget threshold, calculates total costs, and identifies services exceeding the budget.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with exact Azure services and their monthly costs

Add a budget threshold variable

Calculate the total monthly cost using a loop

Identify and list services that exceed the budget threshold

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud cost management is essential for businesses to avoid overspending and optimize resource usage. This project simulates a simple cost analysis tool to help monitor Azure expenses.

💼 Career

Understanding how to analyze and manage cloud costs is a key skill for cloud administrators, DevOps engineers, and cloud architects.

1

Create Azure services cost data

Create a dictionary called azure_costs with these exact entries: 'Virtual Machines': 120, 'Storage': 80, 'App Services': 50, 'SQL Database': 100, 'Networking': 40

Azure

# Create the dictionary azure_costs with the exact service names and costs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with service names as keys and costs as values.

2

Set budget threshold

Create a variable called budget_threshold and set it to 90

Azure

azure_costs = {
    'Virtual Machines': 120,
    'Storage': 80,
    'App Services': 50,
    'SQL Database': 100,
    'Networking': 40
}
# Create the budget_threshold variable and set it to 90
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple variable assignment for the budget threshold.

3

Calculate total monthly cost

Create a variable called total_cost and set it to 0. Then use a for loop with variables service and cost to iterate over azure_costs.items() and add each cost to total_cost

Azure

azure_costs = {
    'Virtual Machines': 120,
    'Storage': 80,
    'App Services': 50,
    'SQL Database': 100,
    'Networking': 40
}
budget_threshold = 90
# Calculate total_cost by summing all costs in azure_costs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Initialize total_cost to zero before the loop. Use the loop to add each cost.

4

Identify services exceeding budget

Create a list called over_budget_services and set it to an empty list. Then use a for loop with variables service and cost to iterate over azure_costs.items(). Inside the loop, if cost is greater than budget_threshold, append service to over_budget_services

Azure

azure_costs = {
    'Virtual Machines': 120,
    'Storage': 80,
    'App Services': 50,
    'SQL Database': 100,
    'Networking': 40
}
budget_threshold = 90
total_cost = 0
for service, cost in azure_costs.items():
    total_cost += cost
# Create over_budget_services list and add services with cost > budget_threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a second loop to check costs against the budget and add the service names to the list.