Logic Apps ; When do I go for a consumption or a fixed pricing model?

Introduction

Today’s post is about the Logic Apps billing model. As you might know, the Integrated Service Environment has been generally available since May 2019. Since then, there is a consumption plan and a fixed price approach for Logic Apps. Lately I have noticed that this still remains confusing… Let us try to demystify this one then? 😉

 

Bibliography

• Pricing Page ; https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/logic-apps/
• Documentation on Pricing & Billing ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-pricing
• Service Limits ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-limits-and-config#throughput-limits

Azure : IT Governance in the cloud

Introduction

During the weekend I saw the following tweet passing by …

Hosting company Verelox has had all their customers dedicated and virtual servers wiped. Their statement: pic.twitter.com/XvAQcofJKu

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) June 10, 2017

Apparently, a hosting company (allegedly) got all their data wiped by an ex-admin. Now I can imagine people thinking that this is something that is part of the territory when it boils down to cloud. So I wanted to write a blog post entailing what you do to set up a governance structure in Azure. Here I’m aware that the above tweet is more related to the security aspect of governance, it’s a part of it nevertheless.

 

Governance?!?

Let’s get started on our scope… IT Governance can cover a lot of ground. In essence, the goal is to assure that the investment in IT generates business value and the risks that are associated with IT projects are mitigated. Though I found that CIO.com has a nice definition on it ;

Simply put, it’s putting structure around how organizations align IT strategy with business strategy, ensuring that companies stay on track to achieve their strategies and goals, and implementing good ways to measure IT’s performance. It makes sure that all stakeholders’ interests are taken into account and that processes provide measurable results. An IT governance framework should answer some key questions, such as how the IT department is functioning overall, what key metrics management needs and what return IT is giving back to the business from the investment it’s making.

So let’s take a look at how we can put an enterprise-grade structure around the management of Azure!

 

TL;DR = Azure Enterprise Scaffold

For those who want to skip the post below… When talking about governance in Azure, the best place that summarizes it the following page in our documentation ; “The Azure Enterprise Scaffold“.

Azure : Billing Automation / Integration via the REST

Introduction
If you are an internal service provider needing to do chargebacks, or get an insight into your spending. Or if you are a cloud service provider in need to bill your customers for their Azure usage… You’ll find your self in need to get the raw usage data of your subscription(s). So today we’ll delve into getting your usage data from Azure via the REST api.

 

Environment Setup
For today’s post, we’ll be using “postman“. A very nice tool suggested by a co-worker of mine (Robin) and it’s really user-friendly to work with! What does the tool do? Basically it’ll let you craft REST calls without the need for custom scripts / coding effort. Why do we need it? Because we’re going to need to do authentication with each call, and let’s say… It isn’t that straightforward if you aren’t accustomed with it (like me at this time). 🙂

In order to set up your environment, I would suggest that you go through the following guide. So basically setup your environment …

and your header preset ;