Controlling spending in the cloud poses challenges of all sizes. Organizations are proactive in getting the most out of the cloud for every dollar spent and ensure seamless, cost-effective cloud operations.
Cloud cost optimization can be achieved by identifying and remediating suboptimal cloud infrastructure provisioning and establishing cloud financial management best practices. Enterprises can enjoy the benefits of elasticity, high availability, reliability and agility.
Cloud spending is a top concern for most IT executives for a number of reasons. According to a 2021 survey, cloud costs are over budget by 23% and are likely to increase by 47% this year. Executives believe that 30% of cloud spending is wasted, and most are unsure of how to fix the problem.
Cloud spending awareness and cost optimization methods
1. Proactively monitor cloud resources
Cloud providers have a wide variety of instance types — each suitable for a variety of workloads. With this wide selection, determining the right version is overwhelming even for professional cloud architects.
There are many cases where developers and application managers — in the best interest of all — not only choose incorrect version sizes, but also choose suboptimal ones — resulting in unintentionally oversized versions. means. In other cases, developers rent cloud computing resources, but forget and leave the cloud idle.
So one of the best methods to save on cloud costs is to proactively monitor your cloud resource usage.
2. Track & fix cost irregularities
While it’s common to see slight variations in cloud usage due to seasonality, it’s still a good idea to keep an eye out for any unexpected spikes and overspending.
Tracking cost anomalies—a centralized Automation task—allows you to respond to cost challenges before they wreak havoc on your budget.
3. Choose the right type of storage
Cloud storage is the most commonly used storage option in the cloud. This is one of the services pioneered by Bizfly Cloud in Vietnam and it is easy to understand why it is so popular:
- Cloud storage is easy to use
- Cloud storage offers virtually unlimited storage
- Easily integrate Cloud storage with many other cloud services and third-party provider services
However, when it comes to controlling costs on Cloud storage, one should be aware of the different storage tiers available from the provider. When using Cloud storage, you should always keep an eye on which of your buckets are accessed frequently and infrequently, and choose the storage level accordingly.
4. Release inactive Elastic IP addresses
Monitor unused IP addresses to automatically detect unused Elastic IP addresses to optimize your cloud costs. Here’s a good example: By default, all AWS accounts are allowed up to five Elastic IP addresses per region so that software and instances will remain available in the event of failure by automatically dynamically remap their IPs with different versions. However, when these Elastic IP addresses are inactive or unused, AWS charges you.
5. Automate infrastructure monitoring during licensing
One of the principles of running the cloud intelligently is to leverage IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to automate infrastructure provisioning — and avoid manual tasks and errors in the process.
The best way to empower your infrastructure is to fully automate the management process and make it a seamless part of your cloud CI/CD
6. Identify & Maximize Software Licensing Costs
On both physical and cloud infrastructures, software licensing fees account for a large portion of operating costs. Because managing and tracking these licenses is difficult when done manually, many organizations pay for a significant number of unregulated and unused licenses.
7. Pause Idle Redshift Clusters when not in use
AWS Redshift clusters provide massive data storage in the cloud. Redshift allows organizations to sift through large amounts of data using batch parallel processing (MPP) and integrates well with S3 through RedShift Spectrum. Redshift Clusters consist of a combination of computing and storage resources.
When you run Redshift clusters on-demand, you continue to pay for those compute nodes even when your clusters are idle — on weekends, for example. To minimize Redshift idle spending, make sure your organization is using pause and resume.
8. Delete unused EBS Snapshots
The cloud provider has the ability to automatically or manually snapshot your EBS volumes. You can store these snapshots in S3 and spin them on another EBS volume in other regions.
One of the best practices in any Solid Cloud Operating Model is to proactively take an EBS snapshot as part of a disaster recovery plan. However, in doing so, you also need to track the accumulation of unused snapshots, which will increase storage costs in S3.
9. Purchase Instances under Savings Plans & Reserved Instances
There are many transaction options for the cloud, including On Demand (on demand), Scheduled (scheduled), Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot. For organizations looking to reduce their cloud spending beyond decentralization, we recommend looking at the Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, which are ideal for persistent and persistent workloads, It also offers discounts of up to 70% off on-demand prices.
10. Building a Cost-Aware Culture
Ultimately, no cloud optimization project will work if you don’t have all the parties involved. To accelerate this cultural change within organizations, businesses need to increase cost awareness across functions and across lines of business with highly discriminatory reporting that promotes transparency. These reports can help expose potentially dangerous and wasteful spending patterns. Decision makers can then fund enterprise-wide initiatives using tactics such as back-projection or chargeback to make cost optimization a top priority for all. stakeholders and reward employees who actively continue to maintain rights.
Think about how your organization currently operates in the cloud. Does your business have a well-defined Cloud Operating Model? Cloud cost optimization doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require a disciplined approach that establishes the habit of establishing good rights and continuously driving insights and action through analytics to reduce your cloud bill.
