On my presentation for the APE Meetup on the 11th of September, I had a demo prepared to show how easy you could build stuff using bicep and Visual Studio Code. A week before i deployed a Application Gateway with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) in front of a simple web app. I have a monthly budget of 150 euro’s to spend on Azure credit. And it was all gone just before the demo. Luckily I had a backup subscription with some credit left, but it was nerve wrecking.
Blog down
After the demo I realized that my blog was down too because the subscription was disabled. I had to move my blog to another subscription and did change the CNAME to the new Static Web App. I just created a new Static Web App in the backup subscription and deployed my blog there. It took 5 minutes to change, but my blog was down for a weekend because you first need to do this.
So here are some tips to avoid this happening to you.
Separate demo from production
So I had a production resource, my blog deployed in the same subscription I play around in with my demos. Not really smart, learn from my mistake and always separate production from demo/test/dev environments. Use different subscriptions if possible.
Setup a budget and alerts
In the Azure portal you can setup a budget for your subscription. You can set alerts to be send when you reach 50%, 75% and 90% of your budget. This way you will be warned in time.
To learn more about setting up budgets and alerts in Azure, check out the official Azure documentation on budgets.
Once you have ran out of credit, you cannot do anything in that subscription anymore, so you cannot create budgets to prevent this from happening right after.
Automate deletion of resources
If you are doing demos often, you can automate the deletion of resources after a certain time. You can use Azure CLI or PowerShell scripts to delete resources after your demo is done. You can also use Azure Automation or Logic Apps to schedule the deletion of resources. Or just create a pipeline in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions to do this for you.