Businesses are increasingly migrating to public clouds, leaving legacy systems behind for more flexibility, faster scalability, and – ideally – better cost-effectiveness. Jason Gay, a senior cloud analyst at managed AWS provider, Mission, highlights five tips to ensure cloud costs stay low.
When it comes to controlling cloud spend, eternal vigilance is the price to pay for, well, lower prices. The single most effective method of cost control is carefully considering the spending impact of each decision related to your public cloud deployment – from overarching architecture strategies down to daily operations.Â
As someone who lives and breathes public cloud implementations (AWS, specifically), I’d like to think I speak from experience with these five best practices for maintaining that cost-cutting vigilance and extending it across the full scope of your public cloud usage:
Practice Strategic Cost Vigilance
You need to incorporate a cost control mindset into all planning around new cloud services and development initiatives. Significant cost savings are usually there for the taking…but only if you can identify inefficient technology choices ahead of their deployment. For instance, a business may have plans to support a new product by launching an AWS EC2 instance. Still, diligent cost oversight may find that the product could run far more affordably – and just as effectively – as an AWS Lambda function.
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Practice Daily Cost Vigilance
It’s not just the macro level that demands attention: vigilant attention to daily cloud spend is essential for preventing small cost inefficiencies from snowballing. All too often, an organization will overlook anomalies that drive cloud spend higher than it should be. These cost centers will then spread unnoticed until someone (usually in finance) finally takes notice and wonders why their cloud bill is so large and has been expanding for months. Like repairing the proverbial stitch in time to save nine, investigating abnormal usage and other costly issues as they arise is well worth the potential savings in cloud spend. Once an issue is identified and understood through a more acute focus, businesses often recognize opportunities to install preventative safeguards that then eliminate that issue going forward.
Organizations should also be willing and prepared to reexamine their approach to the cloud and, if necessary, to redesign their cloud application Opens a new window architecture to lay the groundwork for greater efficiency. In practice, this usually comes out to be a reasonable investment that pays substantial dividends.
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Consider Cloud Spend From the Very Beginning of Development
While developers are naturally eager to charge headlong into putting their visions to action, integrating a thorough cost analysis from the start of development is far, far more prudent from a long-term budgeting perspective. While I wholeheartedly believe that developers should be encouraged to experiment with new technologies in a sandbox account, that cloud account should have guardrails carefully set up to prevent cost overruns. Nothing should ever go into production without an understanding of how you’re going to be billed for it.
Cloud technologiesOpens a new window are inherently exciting (at least among a certain crowd), and it’s easy to forget the cost implications of pursuing particular technologies in the absence of strategic safeguards that bake in a cost analysis process. Technology and cost decisions should involve the correct stakeholders from across the organization to ensure that chosen solutions and projected budgets are aligned with shared goals, and no one experiences unwelcome surprises.
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Revisit Your Long-Term Cloud Strategy Early and Often, – and Design for Agility
All long-term strategic planning should include an appreciation for how quickly things can change. To pick one example we’re all well-acquainted with, the COVID-19 pandemic has made 2020 a much different year than anyone could have predicted, with huge impacts on business demand and budgets.Â
For this reason, it pays for businesses to ensure that their public cloud environments feature the elasticity to scale both up and down as circumstances require. For an example of what not to do, many organizations limit their own options by purchasing long-term reserved instances covering most of their environment. When used strategically, reserved instances do offer tremendous cost savings. However, buying 100% coverage can mean paying for resources that aren’t used or needed. Businesses should plan on leveraging the cloud’s elasticity, leaving room to realize actual cost savings no matter what circumstances arise.
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Maximize Cloud Computing Usage
Isn’t it a highly rewarding feeling to walk around the house and turn off lights in rooms no one is using? Applying this approach to public cloud operations can save businesses a lot of money as well. Many more cloud-using businesses need to turn off what they aren’t using – nobody wants to pay the electric bill for lights that aren’t being used or for HVAC systems running in rooms that aren’t occupied.
It’s important not to over-provision cloud resources. Run cloud resources as close to capacity as possible to maximize the value the cloud offers. For example, take an AWS EC2 instance running with a 10% average CPU utilization and 40% memory consumption – while that extra capacity might offer comfort, it’s not. It’s waste.
Public cloud cost optimization requires a holistic mindset in which every aspect of cloud usage is put to scrutiny as a natural part of your process. By incorporating these techniques into your everyday practices and procedures, meaningful savings will become that much easier to realize.
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