Vampires | How to clean you Azure Subscription

Playing and testing different scenarios and use cases in Azure can generate a lot of ‘garbage’ under your subscriptions.

Vampires
When I say garbage I’m referring to different resources that you create but forget to remove. Don't think at resources like Storage, Web Apps or Worker Roles, but many times when you remove things in odd order, you can end up with some resources that are allocated, but you don’t use anymore and you forget about them. For example the storage of a VM, or Traffic Manager that was used for a Web App.
I named 'vampires' this kind of resources. Why? They consume small amount of money every month. Even the value is not high, you can end up at the end of the month with $10 or $20 consumed on them. They are like electrical vampires that we have in our house – a TV that is in standby, a phone/tablet charger, audio system.

Best Practice
The best practice is very clear and simple. Remove all the time resources that you don’t use anymore. But, sometimes you are in hurry or you don’t have time to double check if you removed everything.
In this situations, you can use a simple rule that will help you to save time and avoid this kind of situations. Add all resources that you create under an Azure Subscription for a demo or for a specific test under the same Azure Resource Group.
A Resource Group is like a container where you can put together resources for the same solution. Don’t forget to give a meaningful name to the Resource Group. Otherwise, you will don’t know what was the purpose of it.
After you finish playing with a demo or with an Azure Solution, the only thing that you need to do is to remove the Resource Group. Removing the Resource Group will remove all the resources that were created under it.

Cleaning
But, what you do if you realize that after a few months playing with Azure, you have under your subscription a lot of resources that you forgot about or a lot of resource groups that are empty.
Well, deleting each of them would take a lot of time. It is a boring task and you don’t want to do this. The other solution is to run a power shell script that remove all the Resource Groups that you have under you Azure Subscription. Let’s call it CleanStartScript.

$selectedSubscription = Get-AzureSubscription -Current
Write-Host Subscription in use: $selectedSubscription.SubscriptionName

Write-Host Start Deleting all Resource Groups

$selectedResourceGroups = Get-AzureRmResourceGroup
foreach($currentResourceGroup in $selectedResourceGroups)
{
  Write-Host Deleting Resource Group: $currentResourceGroup.ResourceGroupName
    Remove-AzureRmResourceGroup -Name $currentResourceGroup.ResourceGroupName -Force -Verbose
  Write-Host Deleted Resource Group:  $currentResourceGroup.ResourceGroupName
}

Write-Host Ended Deleting all Resource Groups

The scrips can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/vunvulear/Stuff/tree/master/Azure/CleanAzureSubscription

Don't forget to select the right subscription before running this script. Do do this, you might find the following power shell scrips usefull:

• Get-AzureSubscription -Current |> Get Current Subscription
• Login-AzureRmAccount |> Login to Azure account
• Get-AzureAccount |> Get A list of all Azure Subscription under the current account
• Get-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionId XXX | Select-AzureRmSubscription |> Set the given subscription as the current one