Cloud Cost Savings: Tips and Strategies

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing are well-known services that have extremely grown in popularity in the last decade, almost every Enterprise has migrated to it or is currently using it, and everybody talks about how migrating to the “cloud" is the best thing you can do for your business.

His popularity is not a secret and has gained it due that almost any technology that can be delivered through the Internet is considered cloud computing. This means that resources like storage, servers, databases, networking, security, and software that were used to be managed by a group of engineers contracted by your business in the past, now are delivered as managed services like Netflix or Spotify, and with minimal knowledge of IT and little effort, you can fully deploy any service that your business need.

Cloud Computing Today

Cloud computing is the technology area that has grown faster than other technologies in the last decade, as well, as is the technology with more innovations than any other. Hundreds of new services come out annually, and thousands of updates are frequently pushed to the existing services.

With all that innovation and excellent services coming out within such a short time frame, usually, IT is running after the carrot to implement and reduce the technology gap in their companies, and in some cases forgetting to follow a clear costs strategy that helps the company to leverage all the benefits provided by the cloud.

Most companies waste an average of 25-30% of their spending on cloud services, principally due to don’t following good practices, being tied to long-term reserving contracts, the architecture design, or implementation decisions.

I used to think that “everything in this life has a solution”, and cloud computing costs aren’t the exception, even if we got critical environments up and running.

Cost-savings strategies

• Savings starts with planning and designing
• Assess correctly your services
• Use cloud cost-savings benefits
• Optimize and monitor spending as a continuous process
• Leverage knowledge from experts

Savings starts with planning and designing

When you’re starting with cloud computing services could be breathtaking to jump into planning costs and usage of your services, but it could be easier than it looks, the tip is “ just keep it simple”.

• Start by breaking down the costs into three main resources: Compute, Network, and Storage.
• Plan the compute you will use in your environments: Persistent computing, temporary compute, or hybrid computing.
• Design your solution having these aspects in mind: Scalability, flexibility, and business continuity.
• Use the cloud service calculator to estimate your initial costs, i.e. AWS Pricing Calculator or Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator
• Choose the right cost model you will be using in your environment. i.e. AWS has several types of plans: Pay-As-You-Go, Reserved Instances, Savings Plan, and Spot Instances.

If you already have services running in the cloud, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t take advantage of the planning or design steps. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, cloud computing is evolving and publishing new services almost every day, and that’s why is important to have a clear and understandable plan and design for the existing or future services.

Assess correctly your services

Cloud providers usually offer different types of saving plans, and to take advantage of those, it’s really important to have visibility of what resources you’re running or you’ll run in the future.

• Start doing an assessment of your current resources.
• Tag your existing resources. i.e. Tagging AWS resources
• Use your billing to rectify your initial assessment

Never assume you already know your resources, always double-check your billing, and do continuous assessments of your environments.

Use cloud cost-savings benefits

When we talk about cost-savings in cloud computing, the first thing that comes to mind is to reduce the number of resources we’re running or downsize existing resources, and although this is a good strategy to save some costs, it’s not the definitive solution.

There are several myths that we use to demystify with the clients that we work on. First, cloud computing is not more expensive than on-premise environments anymore, and second, downsizing resources or eliminating idle resources is not a sustainable cost-saving strategy.

To really take advantage of cloud computing benefits, we should be aware that there’s no wroten recipe to follow, but there are some strategies well documented that can help us to achieve this.

• Budget Control - everything should start at this point. Every company that it’s working with cloud computing should start by having a clear budget for cloud services, and ensure that teams are aware of this budget. i.e. In AWS Cost Managements, you could create a Budget, and alerts are sent whenever the budget limit is exceeded.
• Resource sizing - as I mentioned, resizing is not the final solution, but ensuring that we’re using the correct amount of computers, storage, and networking, it’s crucial to make smart commitments with the cloud service provider. Reduce overprovisioned resources, delete unused or idle resources, and start using autoscaling solutions for those where you know that the number of resources should be flexible.
• Use the cloud costs models - cloud services are evolving every day, and that’s good for us as customers because that evolution is transformed into flexible cost models that help us to reduce fixed service costs. AWS and Microsoft Azure have different cost models such as Pay-As-You-Go, Prepaid/Fixed Subscriptions, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Bring your own license, and many more. Ensure that you’re using the model that better fits your needs.

Optimize and monitor spending as a continuous process

Optimization and monitoring are two topics usually intended for computing, databases, or other types of resources not related to costs, but in cloud computing services, optimizing and monitoring costs should be part of a continuous procedure.

AWS has the Cost Management console, from which you could view and manage your AWS costs in real-time. Features like AWS Budgets help to create and monitor a fixed budget for all your accounts, or specifically for your Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, or AWS Cost Anomaly Detection which continuously monitors your current usage and costs to catch any spike in your current services.

There are several solutions of third-party cost management solutions that you may want to consider in your planning:

• CloudZero
• Komiser
• CloudHealth by VMware

Leverage knowledge from experts

Is well known that most cloud providers usually don’t offer all the advisory on the saving-costs topic, and commonly companies found them selfs involved in a hopeless situation where they’re trying to find the final solution to their costs situation.

Tecbeats could lead your company to take advantage of all the benefits of having services in the cloud. With our expertise and advisory, we could lead you to leverage these tools and give you the opportunity to start saving, optimizing, and automating your costs.