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Keep your Azure Costs low by removing dev resources from resource groups on a schedule.

· 2 min read
Jamie McCrindle
Jamie McCrindle
foldr

I have a Visual Studio subscription that gives me £40.00 of Azure Credit each month to experiment in Azure. I find it relatively easy to spend this if I'm not careful about deleting resources after I've spun them up. Fortunately, I can use a GitHub Actions workflow on a schedule to save me when I forget.

I usually associate a set of resource groups with a repository in GitHub. I have a couple of options, I could delete the resource groups themselves or I could delete the resources in the resource groups. In this example, I've chosen just to delete the resources.

To do this, I use complete mode with an empty ARM template:

{    "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",    "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",    "resources": [    ]}

The GitHub Action then looks as follows:

name: destroy
on:  schedule:    - cron: "0 0 * * *"  # add workflow dispatch to be able to run trigger the workflow manually  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  destroy:    runs-on: ubuntu-latest    steps:        - name: Azure Login      uses: azure/login@v1      with:        creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Destroy      id: deploy-acr      uses: azure/CLI@v1      with:        azcliversion: 2.23.0        inlineScript: |          az deployment group create --name destroy --resource-group NAME_OF_YOUR_RESOURCE_GROUP --template-file .github/workflows/empty.json --mode Complete

Check out the the following repo for a working example: https://github.com/jamiemccrindle/bicep-app-service-container