Explanation
This inefficiency occurs when an App Service Plan is sized larger than required for the applications it hosts. Plans are often provisioned conservatively to handle anticipated peak demand and are not revisited after workloads stabilize. Because pricing is tied to the plan's SKU rather than real-time usage, oversized plans continue to incur higher costs even when CPU and memory utilization remain consistently low.
Relevant Billing Model
Azure App Service Plans are billed based on the selected SKU and instance count, regardless of actual application utilization.
Detection
- Review App Service Plans with sustained low utilization relative to their provisioned capacity
- Identify plans sized for historical or anticipated peaks that no longer occur
- Assess whether plan sizing has been revisited since initial deployment
Remediation
- Resize App Service Plans to better align with observed workload needs
- Periodically reassess plan sizing as application traffic and performance requirements change
- Treat App Service Plan sizing as a recurring optimization activity, not a one-time decision