I burned serious cash and nearly went to the wall, spending on AWS & Azure. How I stopped

After more than a decade of working with the cloud, it still amazes me how much organisations are overspending on their cloud infrastructure. And how unwilling they are to believe this or do something about it.

The public cloud providers have been rubbing their hands together for years, putting you on pay-as-you-go consumption models and selling the value of optimisation and turning things up and down. Knowing full well most organisations won't get there and will spend far more than they expected. Or offering committed spending with a discount and or reserved instances, which then defeat the point of the pay-as-you-go, consumption model, you originally bought into.

The only time businesses get serious about it is when a budget gets smashed or times get hard, i.e. there is enough pain to make it a priority. Well at the moment things are getting harder, the base rate has just gone up, cheap finance is going the way of the dodo and it feels like the worlds leading economies are all flirting with the new fashion?'RECESSION'. One or two central banks have even admitted that the inflation is not transitory, not that this is a surprise anymore.

It's similar to the energy crisis at the moment, the energy companies have been paid to provide smart meters which show you how much you are spending. They might need an upgrade soon to the display to handle bigger numbers.

Who looks at them on a regular basis?

Who even has them plugged in and configured?

Who then does the experiment to look at how much changing to an energy-saving bulb will save?

I know I don't, I don't even know where my 'smart' meter is because it didn't provide any value. It just replicated the information I could get from the providers' company website and to add insult to injury it cost me money to run the thing.

The out-of-the-box tools available from AWS and Azure are similar, they show you what you are spending... if you spend the time to set them up and apportion the different elements of your cloud infrastructure to your business structure or customer deployments, then you might get some value. You can set up alerts to let you know when you are going to go over budget. This is great, as you will know this when you get to your alert level, not at the end of the month when you get the bill.

However, there is an elephant in the room that the public cloud providers don't really talk about. This approach is the same as the 'smart' meters provided by the power companies, it just tells you where you are and how fast you are burning cash. It doesn't have the intelligence to make recommendations or analyse your usage. It doesn't examine:

• Right-sizing services, machines and storage
• Stopping cloud sprawl with redundant or old infrastructure being left sitting there
• New services and options which would reduce costs or increase performance
• Auto scaling to demand for key services - You wouldn't leave the lights, printers and coffee machines on all night in the office, but many do in the cloud

Imagine if you could have all of this intelligence constantly reviewing your cloud and making recommendations. As well as reviewing all the new service offerings and making judgments about how this could save you money if you reconfigured machines, storage, and services.

And that's before you add in the capability to carry out routine maintenance, auto heal and have a 24/7 support option along with dashboards and health monitoring.

Well, as the old saying goes... you can but many will happily keep plugging away with their current cloud approach until the pain gets too much and then you are being reactive instead of planned. If you have an annual spend above 20k then you will be burning money each month in the cloud. So do something about it.

I still ask my team to run a quarterly cost analysis exercise on our own cloud infrastructure without cloud management software CAMS. Even after a decade of working with the cloud, this always raises something, the cloud keeps evolving and you have to evolve with it.

If you want to see what you can do to stop burning cash on the cloud then get in touch.