Are your cloud costs skyrocketing?

How do we keep the costs of the Cloud under control? I often get this question, especially now that more and more organizations are using a 'Cloud unless' strategy. High costs don't necessarily have to be a problem, but they become a problem when these organizations spill money without knowing how much. How do you handle this?

More and more organizations are adopting a “Cloud unless” strategy. Often driven by the need to be flexible and innovative. They often use Multi-Cloud, consisting of a combination of the Public Cloud providers Azure, AWS and Google. It’s usually a roadmap that helps organizations realize their cloud strategy.

I see in practice that this means that organizations develop all kinds of new initiatives and place all kinds of workloads in the Cloud. An important pitfall here is that the cloud principles are not or insufficiently taken into account, with possible negative consequences in terms of availability, security and costs.

High cost

One of the negative consequences that is immediately visible, which I therefore increasingly hear, is that the costs of cloud consumption are far too high and insufficiently under control. High costs are not immediately a problem if this is a conscious choice as part of the strategy to realize speed, flexibility and innovation. It gets annoying when the costs are not under control and people have no idea how much money is being spilled. Money that could have been used more effectively for other innovation initiatives.

Costs under control

The question is therefore: how do you get costs under control again? Cloud providers make various reporting and advisory tools available as part of their service offering. These provide insight into consumption and advise where optimization and saving opportunities lie. You can certainly achieve 'quick wins' with these tools. This includes for example moving a permanently used workload from a pay-per-use to a prepaid subscription.

Well Architected Framework

But taking full advantage of the Cloud while actually keeping costs under control requires a thorough approach. It is important to focus on the cloud principles. These cloud principles have been laid down by both AWS and MS Azure in a Well Architected Framework (WAF). Both frameworks consist of five pillars: operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, security and cost optimization.

Without going deep into this framework model, it is clear that each pillar is important and is inextricably linked to the other pillars in the framework. Cost optimization can’t be seen in isolation from the other four pillars. For example, if you save too much costs on a certain workload, this can have a negative impact on availability and / or performance. Another example of a more complex optimization is the replacement of IaaS with the use of containers or serverless resources.

Continuous process

This is drastic and can’t be implemented just like that. It is important to find the right balance. It helps if a cloud roadmap is used, which provides more insight into the required cloud consumption for a longer period.

Application of the Well Architected Framework, use of tooling and knowledge of the available Cloud services and consumption models is a prerequisite to get costs under control and keep them under control. It is a continuous process!