Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management and Billing comes in.

We’re always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Azure Cost Management and Billing can help you better understand where you’re accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Expanded support for cost allocation across APIs and downloads. Management group exports in Azure Government. Reminder: Cloudyn retiring on June 30. Selecting relative dates in the cost analysis preview. Help improve usability for Azure reservation and savings features. What’s new in Cost Management Labs. New ways to save money with Azure. New videos and learning opportunities. Documentation updates.

Let’s dig into the details.

Expanded support for cost allocation across APIs and downloads

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Customers around the world take advantage of Microsoft Azure to build, deploy, and manage business-critical applications at scale. We continuously innovate to help customers simplify their app deployment and management experience so they can spend more time building great solutions. Today, we are announcing several additional Azure infrastructure capabilities to help achieve this goal.

Simplify your declarative deployment experience in Azure with Bicep

With developers depending heavily on cloud infrastructure to run the apps they create, we continuously strive to simplify the infrastructure setup experience so they can stay focused on the actual innovation and experiences they are crafting within their apps. Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are extremely powerful; however, they can be complex. Bicep, an open-source, domain-specific language (DSL), further simplifies developers’ declarative deployment experience in Azure. Bicep makes it much easier to both read and write infrastructure-as-code in Azure.

Bicep allows customers to deploy Azure resources with many of the conveniences of modern programming languages—now indispensable to any app developer’s workflow. It supports first-class tooling with Visual Studio Code integration and has features such as type safety, modularity, and concise, readable syntax. Bicep is a transparent abstraction over ARM templates, which means everything you can do in

I’m announcing that Azure has achieved adherence to the EU Cloud Code of Conduct (EU Cloud CoC), developed for cloud providers to align with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The EU Cloud CoC is the first GDPR code of conduct that has received the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) positive opinion, which was followed by final approval led by the Belgian Data Protection Authority. The EU Cloud CoC also marks the 100th compliance offering for Azure, more than any other cloud provider, providing customers a high level of assurance through controls, evidence, and verification.

The EU Cloud CoC serves as a basis for implementing the requirements of Article 28 of the GDPR for cloud providers acting as business-to-business processors under the GDPR. Because the EU Cloud CoC is approved by the EDPB, Azure customers can use Azure’s adherence to help demonstrate their own GDPR compliance, as well as cite it as a risk mitigator in a GDPR Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). Article 40 of the GDPR specifically encourages the creation of codes of conduct, so as “to contribute to the proper application of the regulation.” SCOPE Europe acts as the independent monitoring body of the EU Cloud CoC.

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