10 WAYS TO OPTIMISE YOUR CLOUD SPEND
A major challenge that most businesses face is the unpredictable cloud bills on a periodic basis. Businesses struggle to have a singular, transparent view on their cloud spend, and often do not know how they can reduce their costs without affecting their business functions.
Well, while Christmas is on the 25th of December, Santa Claus comes bearing gifts (this blog) today! This blog explores how businesses can identify where and how to decrease their cloud spending, while still getting the most out of the unlimited opportunities that the Cloud provides.
Let's start with breaking down what Cloud Cost Optimization is -
Cloud Cost Optimisation is a use of tools, strategies, and basic practices that helps a business reduce costs, while ensuring none of the business functions are affected, and is in fact more efficient. This also means that an increase in cost does not necessarily mean that it is a problem, considering it is accompanied by a proportional or greater increase in income.
So, how can you optimize your cloud spend?
1.Right sizing your resources
One of the most common problems that cloud architects face are being left with oversized instances. Oversized instances are often left running idle after a point, which adds to the cloud spend by a margin.
Automation services can be implemented to perform actions like restarting or suspending a service, to efficiently use and budget resources.
2. Forecasting
Forecasts need to be set in place on the basis of previous data and current trends, it helps businesses be mindful about spending money on unnecessary resources and services.
When you forecast your needs for a specific period, say a quarter, you can establish the baselines for this period. Based on these forecasts, you can then budget your cloud assets. That’ll help you to plan better and stay within your established budget.
3.Customer Resource Optimisation Strategy
Resource Level Spending can be looked at in depth to give users a clear picture of where the excess spends are. It gives you an idea of how much each cloud resource contributes to your cloud costs, and you can assess each resource on the proportionate returns.
4.Budgeting
It is vital that everyone understands your business' cost requirements and budgets, and it must be clearly conveyed to your IT team or cloud partner before implementation of any service. You can keep allocated the budget in check using tools like CloudSpend (third party) and perform actions whenever it goes beyond the threshold.
5.Auto-Scaling
One of the most known benefits of the cloud is that it is scalable. It allows you to use more resources during peak performance times, and less resources otherwise. As an organization, auto-scaling must be leveraged for an optimal cloud spend. Always stay on top of your business needs and see if they match your cloud usage.
6.Training
Having a cloud fit team in place is essential to execute the plans set in place. Necessary training is a must for those who interact with cloud resources. Share accountability across teams and empower people with the right tools, such as CloudWatch and Virtana Optimize.
Recommended by LinkedIn
7.Analysing the Billing
All cloud service vendors like AWS and Azure provide detailed billing for their services. Make sure this billing is analysed by your team to understand which services cost more than others. Armed with this information, you can understand high-priority resources, such as workstations and virtual machines.
8.Identifying Unused Resources
This can either be done manually or it can be automated, but it is important to not only identify but get rid of unused resources on the cloud. By stopping them from getting billed you will optimise your cloud spends. It can also help you identify which teams are left with these unused resources to maybe help use them more efficiently.
9.Shutting Down During Off-Hours
An option often left unexplored is shutting down of certain cloud resources when they are not required, or during "off hours". It is possible that this can affect your productivity levels. However, to strike a balance between productivity and costs, you can determine usage patterns of your list of resources and selectively shut them down when possible.
10. Leverage Cloud Optimization Tools and Services
There are numerous tools that help you to monitor and assess cloud performance. You must take advantage of robust tools to optimize cloud performance by taking the right decision at the right time. Leading cloud providers, such as Azure and AWS, even have their own native tools for managing cloud costs. Below mentioned are 3 such tools available right now.
a) CloudWatch
This is AWS' service provision that helps you calculate your cloud spend. It has the ability to gather your entire AWS infrastructure data in real time, which is used to generate reports that includes usage, optimisation percentages, in-depth costs, and so on. It also allows you to gain insight on forecasting and budgeting metrics. All of this is displayed on a central dashboard which displays the required information.
b) Azure Cost Management + Billing
Similar to CloudWatch, it is Azure's native tool that provides analysis on cloud costs, usage, forecasts, and other important information. This tool gives you the benefit recommending a set of optimization strategies based on the users' usage patterns. This can help you develop a strategy for cloud cost optimisation.
c) Virtana Optimize
Virtana Optimize is a cloud optimization platform which has the ability to gather data across all the cloud services you use. It can then analyse this data to provide insights on usage, wasted resources, idle time, sizing, and much more. Virtana then generates a set of custom recommendations that you can use to bring down your cloud costs.
To conclude
These practices will help you understand cloud cost optimization and make strategic decisions. As a business owner, these steps should be a priority while setting up business processes on the cloud. These steps not only help you reduce costs on cloud usage, but help you make the most of the available resources and ensure you get the best returns- which is the true meaning of cost optimization.
How can Ataloud help?
Connect with an Ataloud consultant today (yohan@ataloud.com) for a seamless experience for your business' experience on the cloud. We can analyse, discuss and help validate your Cloud billing and usage patterns, perform routine audits, perform log analysis, analyse and monitor performances- on top of the other managed services that we offer.