As you begin your journey with Azure, you should work at estimating the resources you intend to use in Azure. This will help keep you on the right track and also help with budgeting for your services. I try to approach this in the following way:

• Put together the expectations you plan to achieve. This will help keep you on the right path.
• You need to know the apps you are moving and creating. Understand the dependencies, creating sequence diagrams, and flow between resources. This helps with using the Azure pricing calculator.
• I like to prototype, which allows me to test and assess my resources.
• I keep an eye on cost and create alerts when the cost gets close to budgets. You can also put spending limits on subscriptions, but I wouldn't suggest that as once it is hit, your resources will stop working.
• I recommend using tags on your resources to group and monitor data., which can also be alerted on. I leverage this more when I want to track billing by the department so I can charge to their budget.
• Use the Azure Cost Advisor to help review burn and adjust costs.
• Use development and code to help estimate; for example, CosmosDB code snippets to get the cost of a query for estimating.
• You can use pre-paid for your subscription to get a discount in 6-12 month increments.
• Set up an EA or CSP with Microsoft to get discounts on resources.
• Use programs, such as Partners or Bizspark, to receive free allocations by the month.
• Use free resources in non-production environments.
• If you use VMs, size them correctly for expected users. You can start low and then scale up and out.
• Instead of VMs, use PaaS resources.
• Leverage elastic pools in SQL.