Cut-off unnecessary cost in Azure using Serverless360's Automated Tasks

Cut-off unnecessary cost in Azure using Serverless360's Automated Tasks

One critical challenge Organizations report is losing control on the Azure cost; they have multiple Azure subscriptions and many users. They often come across situations where users create a resource and leave it behind without any purpose. Resources like Storage Accounts will attract a storage cost that adds up to the subscription cost even if the blobs they contain are left unused.

But we have a solution in Serverless360 to auto-delete all obsolete content stored in Storage Accounts hence cutting off the unnecessary cost spent on the Azure subscription.

Business Scenario

Let us consider an HR application that needs to save a new employee's details, which does the verification and provides new credentials. The system stores all further details of the employee supplied in a blob container as a backup. This backup will help in resubmitting the transaction in case of failures hence preventing data loss.

This continuous writing of messages into the blobs will cause a drastic increase in the number of blobs inside the Storage Account Blob Container. Unlike Service Bus Queue, where the messages would be removed from the Queue when the application receives it, the blobs will remain even after the application had processed it.

In this scenario, there is a need to purge the blobs that are older than a month. Manual deletion of blobs after age verification is a tedious process. Serverless360 has Automated tasks which allow configuration to perform the deletion.

Solution

Serverless360 has Automated Tasks that users can schedule to do the necessary operations. Now let's configure the Automated Task to delete all old storage blobs older than 90 days.

In Serverless360, enter the Business application with the Storage Account mapped and choose Automated Task in the main menu.

In the Automated Task section, we can create a Storage Account task and enable the conditions to purge the blogs and save them. When this Automated Task executes, it will cleanse all the blobs older than 90 days.

Property Configuration	Scheduling

It is possible to schedule the Automated Task configuration to execute at a defined time without any manual intervention. Hence can be assured of not storing unnecessary data adding up to the cost.

It is also possible to filter the blobs by their name. This feature would be helpful, especially in dev and test environments. Prefix the name of the blobs added by the test system with 'test_', which would facilitate cleaning them up later using Automated Task configured to purge all blobs with a name that starts with 'test_'.

Serveless360’s Automated Task is not only restricted towards Storage blobs, but also possible to automate purge operation on Storage Queues, Storage file share, Storage Tables.

Configure Automated Tasks on storage queue to delete messages piling in the storages queues to avoid reaching the maximum queue size. Typically, stored files in Azure file shares might not be of use after a period. Hence removing unwanted content from Azure file share becomes a business need. From Serverless360’s Automated Task purge based on File modified time and File name constraints. Remove old entities from storage Tables and entities that meet a specific condition like Time stamp and Filter Query.

Having all these features in hand is really a time saver and can effectively reduce the cost spent on your subscription.

To know more about Storage Accounts, visit: https://docs.serverless360.com/docs/storage-account-tasks