Anyone business or startup that hasn’t thought about or isn’t currently using cloud services is missing out. With Microsoft releasing new services to bolster a company’s financial savings and management, cloud services become ever more useful in the world of business. In specific, Microsoft’s cloud service Azure has been gaining quite a lot of traffic, bringing all sorts of services to any serious business, new or old.
For users familiar with the Azure service, Microsoft has just released two new APIs for managing costs related to Azure spending: the Azure Usage API, and the Azure RateCard API. These APIs allow a company to check their expenditures and consumption in various services through Azure in a very customizable and flexible way.
- The Azure Usage API is a REST API for getting specific usage data on an Azure subscription based on tags set to different resources. With this billing API, a business could set a tag to analyze the amount of resources used by each department in their company.
- The Azure RateCard API is a more niche but similarly useful REST API for customers and partners to gather and check all of the resources that are available and usable to them, and the information and pricing on all of them.
Direct usage of Microsoft Azure’s billing API is also possible, allowing you to write custom reports for billing and tracking logics. Here’s a quote from an official Microsoft Github sample.
The Microsoft Azure Billing APIs enable integration of Azure Billing information into your applications, providing new insights into your consumption of Azure resources, allowing you to accurately predict and manage your Azure resource consumption costs.
To learn more about the Billing Usage and RateCard APIs, visit the overview article Gain insights into your Microsoft Azure resource consumption. Visit the Azure Billing REST API Reference article for more details on each of the APIs.
All in all, Microsoft Azure’s new billing APIs will allow anyone to efficiently track and better spend their money.
Further reading: API, Azure, Cloud Computing, Management, Microsoft
