Cloud computing has experienced explosive growth since its inception over a decade ago, with platforms and applications now proliferating across enterprises. But while adoption has never been a problem, over-spending was, is, and will continue to be. These quick tips will help you optimize your cloud spend and free up a valuable chunk of your budget.
1. Understand Your Cloud
Do you truly know what's in your cloud estate? Do you know exactly what your money is paying for? The first step towards optimizing your cloud environment is ensuring you have a clear understanding of your current cloud set-up.
This requires examining the needs and commitments of your IT departments, analyzing your latest cloud bills, and implementing a process of continuous monitoring. For many organizations, this task requires resources that simply aren't available in-house – one of the reasons the cloud management services market is set to grow to $62.8 billion by 2021.
Indeed, understanding your cloud requires investment, but you can only begin making improvements once you've established a good level of visibility. You can't fix what you can't measure.
2. Correct Your Server Sizing
Cloud servers offer various RAM and CPU capacities. When setting up your cloud environment, you might base your capacity requirements on educated guesswork, but this can lead you to purchase far more than you need to.
Choosing the correct
Once you've figured this out, you can scale your server size to suit your traffic levels. Some public cloud providers, like Amazon, have auto-scaling functions that can automatically increase (or decrease) your CPU and RAM capacities in-line with your traffic flow. However, this is far from simple to implement – it requires custom scripts and templates that can be tricky to configure correctly. There are also limits to AWS auto-scaling, meaning it won't be a suitable solution for all applications for all enterprises.
Don't think that auto-scaling is a one time fix either: it requires a constant process of monitoring usage patterns, understanding new cloud products, and then determining the best method of rightsizing. This exercise has to be repeated every few weeks to ensure your server usage remain as efficient as possible.
Whether you decide to correct your server sizing in-house, or employ the help of a cloud management services provider to do the heavy lifting, you should take advantage of all the available techniques to make ensure resource wastage is minimized.
3. Optimize Your Billing
One of the biggest benefits of migrating your workloads to the public cloud is the flexible nature of the billing system. You only pay for what you use. However, massive discounts are available if you choose the most applicable payment model. There are 3 main models available on most public cloud platforms:
- On Demand
This is the classic pay-as-you-go payment structure that makes the cloud so attractive for many. It's a good choice for most use cases when you don't know how long you'll need the resource to be available.
- Spot Instances
AWS calls them "
Beware, however: if someone is willing to bid more money than you, you'll lose your instance.
- Reserved Instances
Reserved instances offer the opportunity to save up to 75
However, a downside to this reserved cloud pricing structure is that businesses can fall into the trap of reserving more cloud services than they'll use. Try to not put the cart before the horse – it's safest to stick with on-demand instances if you're not sure.
By utilizing the appropriate mix of these varying payment models, you can help ensure that cloud-related costs are kept optimized – saving your enterprise a significant amount.
4. Don't Overlook the Small Stuff
When you're busy worrying about the big stuff like optimizing cloud storage and compute capacities, it's easy to forget about all the smaller, peripheral charges that soon add up.
These charges can be caused by a variety of factors, including leaving redundant VMs running and forgetting about orphaned resources left in storage. Keep a close eye on your usage reports to spot these extra costs and take steps to root them out.
As mentioned earlier, optimizing your cloud to be as cost-efficient and effective as possible is no small task. There's a lot of hard work and dedication involved if you decide that an in-house solution is best for your organization.
Alternatively, you could talk to Cass. As a global, completely independent, and imminently stable cloud management services provider, we can give you total visibility over your cloud investment, optimize your costs, and safeguard your cloud from security and compliance risks. For more information about the various public cloud options available, download our comprehensive guide today.
Topics: Cloud Management Services
