Governance and cost management are among the top priorities for companies moving to the cloud. Having an Azure subscription with a pay-as-you-go scheme can harm the company budget because anyone with access to the subscription can provision as many resources as they like. Some resources are free but others are expensive. It is important for organizations to remain in control of their cloud costs. Tags help in generating billing reports. These reports could be based on departments, projects, owners, or any other criteria. While cost is important, governance is equally important. Azure provides locks, policies, and RBAC to implement proper governance. Policies ensure that resource operations can be denied or audited, locks ensure that resources cannot be modified or deleted, and RBAC ensures that employees have the right permissions to perform their jobs. With these four features, companies can have sound governance and cost control for their Azure deployments.

DevOps on Azure will be the focus of the next chapter, in which some of its important concepts and implementation techniques will be discussed.