Cost optimization pillar in Azure - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Cost Optimization Pillar in Azure Cloud

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud engineer for a small company that wants to save money on their Azure cloud resources. Your manager asked you to create a simple setup that tracks resource usage and applies cost-saving configurations.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic Azure resource configuration that includes a list of resources with their costs, a budget threshold, and logic to identify which resources exceed the budget. Finally, add a tag to those resources to mark them for cost review.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary of Azure resources with their monthly costs.

Add a budget threshold variable to compare costs.

Write logic to find resources exceeding the budget.

Tag the expensive resources with a 'CostReview' label.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use cost optimization to avoid overspending on cloud resources by tracking usage and tagging expensive resources for review.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and architects must understand cost management to design efficient, budget-friendly cloud environments.

1

Create Azure resources cost dictionary

Create a dictionary called azure_resources with these exact entries: 'VM1': 120, 'Storage1': 80, 'DB1': 150, 'AppService1': 90

Azure

# Create the azure_resources dictionary with exact costs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with resource names as keys and costs as values.

2

Add budget threshold variable

Create a variable called budget_threshold and set it to 100 to represent the maximum allowed monthly cost per resource.

Azure

azure_resources = {'VM1': 120, 'Storage1': 80, 'DB1': 150, 'AppService1': 90}
# Create budget_threshold variable with value 100
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 100 to the variable named budget_threshold.

3

Identify resources exceeding budget

Create a list called expensive_resources that contains the names of resources from azure_resources whose cost is greater than budget_threshold. Use a list comprehension with resource and cost as variables.

Azure

azure_resources = {'VM1': 120, 'Storage1': 80, 'DB1': 150, 'AppService1': 90}
budget_threshold = 100
# Create expensive_resources list with resources costing more than budget_threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension to filter resources by cost.

4

Tag expensive resources for cost review

Create a dictionary called resource_tags where keys are resource names from azure_resources. For each resource in expensive_resources, set its tag to 'CostReview'. For others, set the tag to 'Normal'.

Azure

azure_resources = {'VM1': 120, 'Storage1': 80, 'DB1': 150, 'AppService1': 90}
budget_threshold = 100
expensive_resources = [resource for resource, cost in azure_resources.items() if cost > budget_threshold]
# Create resource_tags dictionary tagging expensive resources as 'CostReview' and others as 'Normal'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary comprehension with a conditional expression to assign tags.