To summarize, the strategy of Azure cost optimization begins with discovering where your Azure dollars are currently being spent. There are several tools to assist you with this process, the cost management and billing feature in Azure and the Azure Cost Management tool, also assessable from the cost management and billing feature. Once you've identified your current Azure costs, you can then prioritize and focus on reducing costs and maximizing your resource usage. If you have resources deployed on Azure IaaS virtual machines, you can reduce your compute costs by using virtual machine scale sets to add or remove server capacity on demand. It may also be possible to configure one or more of your scale sets as low priority and have instances deleted when demand is low. When it comes to disk storage for your virtual machines, it is more cost-effective to use managed disks. And of course you need to choose the appropriate disk type, premium, standard SSD, or standard HDD. Use the advisor feature in the Azure portal to help you to locate underutilized virtual machines and delete virtual machine disks that are no longer needed. 

If you're currently using pay as you go pricing, seriously consider using Azure Reserved Instances. Whether a one or three-year commitment, you'll instantly realize significant cost savings. When analyzing your network costs, remember that in most cases, you're only paying for outbound data transfers. The exception to this is with VNet peering where you'll pay for both inbound and outbound traffic, so it's important to determine if VNet peering is absolutely necessary. The vest way to minimize network costs is to deploy all of your resources into a single region. Lastly, consider if ExpressRoute is a necessity in your deployment. ExpressRoute, while providing fast throughput, is expensive. Leverage your existing site-to-site capabilities whenever possible. Reducing storage costs begins with understanding that charges are based on per gigabyte per month. Carefully review what is currently residing in your storage accounts and delete unneeded files and virtual machines, as well as virtual machine snapshots. Instead of storing snapshots, use the Azure recovery vault in combination with a comprehensive retention policy to store your server backups. 

In analyzing your identity costs, the key factor is in deciding what Azure AD edition is needed for your organization, Free, Basic, Premium 1, or Premium 2. Carefully determine which features are important in your organization and choose the lowest cost edition that supports those features. If your business qualifies, you can also save money by entering into an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft. Reducing application deployment costs begins with determining whether your specific deployment requires that you have access to the operating system.

 If so, Azure Cloud Services provides that level of access. Otherwise, the preferred method is by using Azure App Services. With either service offering, it's important to choose the right plan based on the demands of the workload deployed. Also, deploy all of your production web apps into a single plan, and deploy your development environment into another plan. And in many cases, the production and development deployments are best deployed in separate Azure accounts, and then you can delete the development resources when no longer needed. For Cloud Service deployments, remember that there are charges incurred for your resources deployed to any and all staging slots. Delete these slots, for example, after a successful and stable deployment of a development slot web app that was swapped to the production slot. By periodically auditing your Azure spending and implementing the best practices outlined in this course, you will be able to maximize your Azure expenditures and reduce your Azure spend.