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copilot --idea "Cost Optimisation Co-pilot"
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Turn Copilot CLI into your FinOps assistant — analyse spend, find waste, and right-size everything
The Problem
Your Azure bill arrives. It's 40% higher than last month. Nobody knows why. The cost management portal has charts, but they don't tell you what to DO about it. You need actionable recommendations, not pie charts.
What You'll Build
A comprehensive cost optimisation workflow that:
- Breaks down spend by service, resource group, and tag
- Identifies the top 10 cost drivers and why they're expensive
- Finds concrete savings opportunities with dollar amounts
- Generates scripts to implement the changes
- Creates a forecast showing projected savings
Step-by-Step Walkthrough
Phase 1: Understand Current Spend
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"Show me my Azure costs for the last 3 months.
Break down by service type, then by resource group.
Highlight anything that increased more than 20% month-over-month."
The azure-cost skill does the heavy lifting here, querying the Cost Management API and formatting the results.
Phase 2: Find Quick Wins
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"Find all resources I can save money on immediately:
- VMs that could switch to B-series burstable
- Storage accounts on Hot tier with no access in 90 days
- App Service plans running Basic that could use Free/Shared
- SQL databases with consistently low DTU usage
- Redis caches with <5% memory utilisation
Calculate the exact monthly savings for each change."
Phase 3: Reserved Instance Analysis
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"Analyse my VM and SQL usage patterns for the last 12 months.
Which resources have been running continuously?
Calculate savings if I purchase 1-year reserved instances.
Compare with 3-year reservations.
Show the break-even point for each."
Phase 4: Right-Sizing
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"For every VM in the subscription:
- Show current SKU vs actual CPU/memory usage (p95)
- Recommend a right-sized SKU
- Calculate monthly savings
- Flag any VMs that could move to spot instances
Sort by potential savings, highest first."
Phase 5: Implement & Track
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"Generate Azure CLI commands to implement the top 10 savings.
Add --what-if flags so I can review before applying.
Create an Azure Monitor alert that fires if monthly spend
exceeds the new projected budget by 10%."
Pro Tips
• Run this analysis monthly — costs drift over time as usage patterns change
• Use resource tags to allocate costs to teams — makes conversations easier
• The azure-cost skill can forecast end-of-month spend based on current trajectory
• Consider Azure Savings Plans for flexible compute commitments
What You'll Learn
• Azure Cost Management APIs and analysis techniques
• FinOps practices — showback, chargeback, and optimisation cycles
• Reserved instances, savings plans, and spot VM strategies
• Building cost governance into your cloud operations