How I Reduced My Azure Costs by 29% with a Simple DevOps Cleanup

Running a homelab in the cloud isn’t just a fun side project — it’s a serious hands-on way to sharpen skills in infrastructure, automation, and DevOps workflows. But it also comes with real costs, especially when you’re self-funding everything.

I recently managed to reduce my monthly Azure bill by 29% — without touching CPU or memory, without changing VM sizes, and without downgrading performance.

Here’s how.

The Setup: A Self-Funded Homelab on Azure

My homelab runs on Microsoft Azure and includes:

  • A single Standard_D2s_v3 VM (2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM)

  • 127 GB Premium SSD OS disk

  • A simple load balancer

  • Snapshots for testing rollback scenarios

  • No autoscaling, no Kubernetes, no crazy CI/CD pipelines — just the essentials

The goal: keep things lean, consistent, and close to real-world infrastructure, but under personal budget control.

The Hidden Cost: Snapshots

Like many, I took regular snapshots of my VM for safety. At some point, I had two full snapshots sitting there — forgotten, idle, and quietly burning cash.

Each snapshot of a 127 GB Premium SSD can cost around €17–18/month depending on region and storage tier.

Two of them? That’s ~€36/month.
That’s 29% of my total monthly Azure bill right there.

The Fix: Two Lines of Code

There was no need for a massive architectural redesign.

I simply deleted the snapshots I didn’t need anymore:

bash
az snapshot delete --name quickvm-snapshot-2025-05-11 --resource-group quick-vm-rg
az snapshot delete --name quickvm-snapshot-2025-05-12 --resource-group quick-vm-rg

That’s it.

What This Means Long-Term

That cleanup alone saves me over €430 per year — for a homelab!
If I had let those unused snapshots sit for 3–5 years, they would have cost more than the VM itself.

Key Takeaways for Azure Cost Control

Whether you’re running a personal lab or managing a production environment, these principles apply:

  • Review unused resources regularly. Snapshots, unattached disks, idle VMs, zombie NICs — they all add up.

  • Automate cleanup when possible. Use scheduled scripts or Azure Automation to delete unused assets.

  • Monitor usage with Cost Management. Azure’s built-in tools let you drill into billing data fast.

  • Smaller wins compound. A €10/month waste today is a €120/year loss tomorrow.

Final Thoughts

Cost optimization isn’t always about switching VM types or moving workloads to another cloud.
Sometimes, it’s just about paying attention and keeping your environment lean.

If you’re running a homelab or experimenting in the cloud, don’t forget:
every GB, every snapshot, every idle service is part of the bill.

Keep it clean. Keep it smart.
That’s DevOps — even at home.

Tags: Azure, DevOps, Homelab, Cost Optimization, FinOps, Cloud Cleanup, Infrastructure, Self-Funded Projects