Despite the benefits and flexibility of the cloud, IT decision-makers still have to worry about costs. Although negligible at the outset, businesses often find cloud costs rise exponentially over time and take away valuable resources from other IT projects.
Having a cloud cost optimization strategy is critical to ensure the company’s bottom line is not hurt. To keep cloud costs under control, you must create a plan that encompasses all aspects of cloud computing. Read on to find out how you can keep cloud costs under control.
1. Monitor analytics to manage usage and do capacity planning
Utilize infrastructure and application monitoring and management tools to obtain more analytics. Use the information to establish visibility into your cloud environment.
With enhanced visibility, you can keep tabs on cloud sprawl. You can identify and shut down unnecessary workloads to conserve computing power. You can identify and remove apps that are not being used to free up storage space. With increased visibility, you can monitor the performance of an app and obtain valuable insights into how you can improve its functionality.
Analytics also help in capacity planning. You have to ensure that there is adequate capacity to accommodate load fluctuations and abnormal traffic spikes while taking care that you do not end up spending a large amount on idle capacity. Use techniques like caching and queuing to meet abnormal traffic spikes instead of paying for idle capacity. Check for underutilization of capacity.
2. Utilize cost-monitoring tools
Some cost-monitoring tools analyze past cloud expenditure to forecast expenses for the next few months. Other cost-monitoring tools let you track expenditure across individual cloud services. The more information you have, the more efficiently you can allocate cloud resources.
Some other cost-monitoring tools let you set custom alerts to notify users when they go over budget and even limit access to resources to keep down costs. Lots of cost monitoring tools can detect cost spikes and generate cost optimization reports to help you identify services that may need to be streamlined.
3. Scale up or down according to organizational needs
One of the greatest benefits of cloud computing is that you can scale up or down according to organizational requirements. Maximize the benefits from analytics by estimating capacity needs. Use analytics to also optimize systems. For instance, when you optimize servers for memory, database, graphics, storage capacity, throughput, and computing demands, you free up existing capacity that can then support other processes.
Do not spend capital upfront and overbuy capacity when you can easily scale when needs arise. Cloud platforms have autoscaling, load balancing, and on-demand capabilities that let you scale up computing power at any time. For instance, you can configure autoscaling parameters to set performance limits on low-priority workloads or the minimum number of resources that can be utilized to meet specific demands.
Ensure that you regularly review organizational needs and resize your cloud infrastructure. When you maintain your cloud infrastructure at the right size, you can achieve significant cloud cost optimization.
4. Schedule work and workloads using heat maps
According to several estimates, organizations can cut down 70% of their cloud costs just by switching off services when not in use. This is especially true for cloud licenses based on a usage model. Applications that run continuously cause costs to balloon without employees knowing.
Use heat maps to identify peaks and troughs in computing demand. For instance, heat maps provide visibility on whether development servers can be shut down during weekends and public holidays. Schedule resources and configure them to start and stop automatically at specific times or for specific workloads.
Being aware of peak and idle times lets you switch from a fixed cost pricing model to a dynamic or pay-as-you-go pricing model that achieves significant savings.
5. Automate
Automate tasks related to backup and storage, compliance, code deployment, configurations, security scans, and resource allocation. Automation reduces the amount of manual labor needed to keep systems running. Less human intervention reduces the instances of errors and frees up IT personnel to concentrate on business-critical tasks.
Implement cloud orchestration to combine automated workflows into a single process that can then be executed quickly and automatically.
6. Identify and manage unused, unattached, and idle resources
Often developers “spin up” a quick temporary server and then forget to delete it. Sometimes administrators forget to remove storage attached to instances they have terminated. Companies still have to pay charges for these unused resources. Remove them.
An idle computing instance may use just 1-5% of CPU capacity, but an enterprise still has to pay fully for that instance. This is a considerable waste of finances. You must identify such idle resources and consolidate computing tasks, so you can optimize instances.
Use analytics to identify instances of overprovisioning of resources. Overprovisioning resources is quite common when you have migrated applications from dedicated physical servers to cloud-based ones.
Check for orphan instances, containers, or volumes that are no longer being used. If there are no instances associated with an Elastic Load Balancer (ELBs), delete it. Delete unassociated IPs and unused machine images.
Licenses are priced on either a per-user basis or a usage basis. Make sure that you know how many employees will use a particular service. Remove old or unwanted user accounts of employees who have moved on or no longer need a service. Regular cleanups ensure your software license budget is under control.
7. Reduce excess storage
Your business pays a monthly fee for cloud storage capacity. Reduce excess storage by retraining your staff on data copying and versioning practices. Decide which files must be stored in the cloud and which can be stored on a local server at a lower cost. Make sure you put operational guidelines in place, so everyone in the organization adheres to these file storage practices.
Free up storage space by identifying inactive mailboxes and archiving to a .pst file. This file does not add to the size of your mail server. Consider automating the process.
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