What are your strategies for managing cloud development and testing costs and risks?

Do not get lured in by features that end up locking in your data, other than your technology. Bring on your own identity provider: Keycloack and federate with that. Were you to migrate cloud, you retain data backups and technology. HaProxy shall be your load balancer and ingress and TLS termination: everything else is just a steal. Were you to migrate, you keep your investment in time and technology. Since you shall migrate one day, make it as easy and pain-free as possible.

1. Define project goals, scope, and budget, and select the right cloud service provider. Consider security, compliance, and performance requirements. 2. Use Automation: Implement CI/CD, IaC, and test automation to reduce errors and save time. 3. Utilize auto-scaling, load balancing, and resource tagging to optimize cloud resources for cost efficiency and performance. 4. Regularly conduct unit, integration, and performance testing to identify and address issues promptly. 5. Gather and apply user feedback for improvements using tools like user analytics and A/B testing. 6. Use effective communication and project management tools to foster collaboration and alignment with best practices among team members and stakeholders.

In today's world where development is distributed across multiple geographies, make sure that 1. You choose the right data center that is closest to your development team to reduce latency thus saving on the most precious resource - developer costs. 2. Ensure that the Cloud platform that you have chosen has the same capabilities in the datacenters close to your development teams. This is not always guaranteed specifically if you are using Cloud Native development

Every project that was finished successfully was due to the due diligence done prior to the project starting. Just like the saying goes “Measure twice and cut once” this means if you do all of your research and spend the time to plan you will be successful when it comes time to execute. You shouldn’t fail to plan because in return you are planning to fail.

Automation is true efficiency booster, whether the development is in-house or cloud based. There is really no additional value that you get with cloud native development and automation that we would get from in house development.

Cloud usage and spending is one of the significant risks during development. One wayward program can launch 10,000 spot instances resulting in huge cloud bills for the month. These are legitimate programming errors that can occur during development. One way to prevent it is to ensure that development is always done in a separate account where there are hard spending limits setup. Thus programs running amok will get stopped automatically.

This is 100% correct. Also each company has different types of accounts such as Dev and Test. If I were to optimize resources it would be to use the minimum resources needed for the specific task you are trying to accomplish. If you are just testing some code you don’t need to spin up high consumption tools. Use what you need for your testing.

I think that a big aspect missing from the article is?observability. Observability encompasses?logs, metrics, and traces. An environment that is not observable is incapable of providing insights that can lead to cost savings and better decision-making.?Alerting?is also a crucial aspect of a cloud environment. It reduces downtime and sometimes even prevents it.