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Azure billing is confusing enough without having to guess which contract type you actually have. Shannon shows us actually matters. Azure billing has three separate layers that people treat as interchangeable when they're not.

Agreements are your legal contract with Microsoft. This is either Enterprise Agreement or Microsoft Customer Agreement. That's it. This determines which billing APIs work and which portal views you can trust.

Commitments are promises to spend a certain amount over time. Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment sits here. MACC isn't an agreement or a subscription type. It's a spending tracker that lives at the billing account level. Not every organization has one, and it doesn't change your pricing by itself.

Subscription offers are how individual subscriptions get created and billed. Pay As You Go is a subscription offer, not an agreement. You can have PAYG subscriptions and still have a MACC commitment at the account level. CSP describes the sales channel you bought through, not your agreement type.

Why does this matter for your work? If you don't know your agreement type, you don't know which billing scopes to use in Cost Management. If you don't know whether a MACC exists, your burn down charts might be tracking nothing real. If you miss that you're in CSP, your Marketplace assumptions will be wrong.

You can stop guessing and start proving with a few scripts. The article walks through Azure CLI and PowerShell commands that show you exactly what you have.

The article includes a complete script that walks every subscription you have access to, pulls all this information, and exports it to a CSV. You run it once and get a clean table showing subscription name, offer type, agreement type, whether CSP is involved, whether MACC exists, and the full billing scope path.

EA and MCA are agreements, MACC is a commitment, and PAYG and CSP are subscription constructs layered on top. They're not competing labels. They're different parts of the same system, and Azure only becomes confusing when those layers get mixed together.

Assumptions about your billing structure are expensive, but scripts that prove what you actually have are cheap.

Learn how to manage your Azure Bill in our Azure FinOps Course

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EC2 8th Gen Instances (C8id/M8id/R8id) offer 43% higher compute performance and 3.3x memory bandwidth.

New partner revenue measurement for service consumption attribution

AWS Marketplace supports localized billing for Professional Services in EMEA

DynamoDB Global Tables now support multi-account replication, enabling cleaner cost allocation and governance across organizational boundaries.

Read All AWS Updates

Google has corrected a reporting error in Carbon Footprint where Cloud Run emissions were missing for late 2025. FinOps teams focused on sustainability should backfill data transfers to ensure historical accuracy in their green-ops reporting.

Read All GCP Updates

Container Storage v2.1.0 introduces native Elastic SAN support to improve TCO for stateful Kubernetes workloads.

Read All Azure Updates

On March 2nd, join experts from Cyera, Wiv.ai, and AWS for a deep-dive webinar on how engineering and cloud finance teams are embedding business logic directly into their infrastructure.

What to expect:

When: March 2, 2026 | 12 PM EST

Speakers:
– Dror Levin, FinOps Architect @ Cyera
– Dvir Mizrahi, VP FinOps @ Wiv.ai
– Yuriy Prykhodko, Principal Technical Account Manager @ AWS

This episode provides a framework brought by Zach Johnson, Head of FinOps at Splunk, for building a FinOps Center of Excellence, mastering monthly reviews, and implementing unit economics to quantify the value of every dollar spent in the cloud

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Most FinOps teams are told they need executive sponsorship, but nobody explains what that actually means in practice. Support from the top is not the same as having real authority to do your job.

Frank Contrepois introduces a practical tool called the FinOps Executive Mandate. Think of it as a written agreement that turns vague executive support into clear decision-making power. Here's what the mandate does:

It answers the questions that usually get answered differently every time. Can you add work to team backlogs? Can you require time from engineers? Who can you talk to directly? Which business priorities should guide your decisions?

It connects FinOps work directly to company strategy. If your company cares most about growth, you'll make different choices than if it cares most about predictability. The mandate forces executives to state their priorities up front, so you're not guessing.

The mandate follows an 80/20 approach. About 80 percent of organizations struggle with the same basic problems: unclear scope, unstated priorities, and assumed decision rights. The mandate covers this common ground as a stable core. The other 20 percent is your specific context, which goes in appendices that can change without rewriting the whole thing.

The article includes a template and guide for getting the mandate approved by executives.

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S3 storage costs can quietly drain your cloud budget through two types of forgotten data that are completely safe to remove. Amazon S3 Storage Lens gives you a free way to spot these costs without any risk to your production systems.

The first cost drain is noncurrent object versions. The second drain is incomplete multipart uploads.

Turn on Storage Lens in your S3 console. The basic version is free. Name your dashboard something simple like "Cost-Optimization-Dashboard" and set it to include all regions. If you use AWS Organizations, create it from your management account to see all your accounts at once. Wait 24 to 48 hours for data to show up.

Look at two specific metrics. First is "Noncurrent version bytes" which shows storage used by old file versions. Second is "Incomplete multipart upload bytes" which shows those abandoned fragments.

Start small with 2 or 3 non-critical buckets. Watch what happens. Then expand to more buckets once you feel comfortable. Storage Lens will show you the results. Noncurrent version bytes should drop within days. Incomplete uploads often fall to zero. Your total storage costs in AWS Cost Explorer will go down to match.

Don't spend hours trying to save five dollars a month. Production data needs generous retention periods. Storage is relatively cheap compared to the risk of losing important data.

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Turning off cloud resources when you're not using them sounds simple, but many companies skip this step and jump straight to buying Reserved Instances or Savings Plans instead. That's a mistake that costs real money.

Alfonso San Miguel makes a strong case for why automated start/stop should be your first move, especially in non-production environments. The math is compelling. A basic 12x5 schedule (Monday through Friday, 7 AM to 7 PM) cuts your costs by 64%. Nights and weekends only? You're looking at 71% savings. Weekend shutdowns alone save 29%.

Compare that to Reserved Instances. To match those savings percentages, you'd need to commit to three-year terms and deal with constant license tracking, utilization monitoring, and renewal headaches every year.

You have options for automation. Azure DevOps pipelines can run scheduled scripts. Automation runbooks handle PowerShell commands on timers. Azure Functions work with timer triggers. Or you can use built-in features like VM automated shutdown and the Start/Stop VMs v2 solution.

The smart approach is to start with dev and test environments where business impact is low but savings potential is high. Use tags like "AutoShutdown: Enabled" and "Schedule: 12x5" so your automation knows what to manage. Build in exceptions for maintenance windows and deployments. Make sure everyone knows the schedule so developers aren't surprised when their test environment is offline.

Save Reserved Instances for the things that truly run 24/7, like domain controllers and monitoring systems. Everything else should stop when not in use.

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