The Silent $8,200 Drain: A Story of Long-Term Retention Gone Wrong
"Why is our Azure SQL bill so high for dev/test databases?"
It started with a seemingly innocuous question from our finance team. Our Azure costs were creeping upwards, and nobody could quite pinpoint the source. We knew our production databases were optimized, so the finger-pointing began. Eventually, the spotlight landed on our development and testing environments.
Little did we know, a silent, costly misconfiguration was lurking in the shadows, slowly draining our budget.
The 7-Year Backup Plan (for Dev/Test?)
Our initial hunch was that the dev/test databases were simply over-provisioned. We diligently right-sized instances, optimized queries, and patted ourselves on the back for a job well done. Yet, the costs remained stubbornly high. It felt like bailing out a sinking boat with a teaspoon.
The "Aha!" Moment: Long-Term Retention
During a late-night debugging session, while poring over Azure cost reports, we finally stumbled upon the culprit: Long-Term Retention (LTR). A well-intentioned team member, aiming for robust data protection, had configured LTR for our dev/test databases. The problem? They'd set the retention period to 7 years, not the intended 30 days.
For production databases, this long retention period would be justified. For dev/test? It was like building a bomb shelter for a sandcastle.
EazyOps to the Rescue
Manually identifying and rectifying this misconfiguration across dozens of databases would have been a tedious and error-prone process. Fortunately, EazyOps automatically flagged this excessive retention as an anomaly. With a few clicks, we reset the retention tiers to 30 days, aligning them with our actual business needs.
The Results: Silence is Golden (and Cheaper)
The impact was immediate. Our Azure SQL bill for dev/test environments dropped by $683 per month, totaling an annualized savings of $8,200. More importantly, we gained peace of mind knowing that EazyOps was continuously monitoring our environment for similar misconfigurations.
About Shujat
Shujat is a Senior Backend Engineer at EazyOps, working at the intersection of performance engineering, cloud cost optimization, and AI infrastructure. He writes to share practical strategies for building efficient, intelligent systems.