Making the most of what the Azure Cloud has to offer while keeping a strict budget is a goal of mine for every solution I produce.
My first key to keeping a strict budget is avoiding the need for virtual machines whenever possible. Now it might just be my age showing, but referring to Scott’s Pizza As a Service example - if I wanted a pizza every once in a while, I personally wouldn’t build & maintain a pizza oven in my house. The challenge that comes with in this case is finding the compute & hosting services that can best fit the your needs.
My second key to keeping a strict budget is regularly reviewing the compute & hosting services available to identify opportunities to save money. A common feature of the best Cloud services is autoscaling
If you read my blog post, Keys to Being Cost Effective in Azure, you
When it comes to all types of software development the shorter your feedback loop is, the faster you can learn from and react to changes, and the faster you can deliver a valuable working product - but in many cases that has always came at the cost of at least one virtual machine.
Where the costs start to stack up in the software development industry is when you realize that virtual machines were needed not only for hosting any products & services (multiplied by the number of copies needed of the production environment for development, test/qa, etc.), but also for building & developing those products & services.
Now I will admit that I am not old enough to have seen for myself, but I hear from my elder peers that dedicated build virtual machines were not typically maintained properly - nor were they