Understanding an organization’s primary objectives is key to steering its course. While startups focus on customer expansion, larger businesses strive to boost margins.
For DevOps, comprehending these goals guides decisions, maintaining a delicate balance between customer needs and business value.
However, gaining clarity on cost drivers becomes challenging as cloud adoption expands.
Surprisingly, Gartner reports that up to 70% of cloud costs might be wasted, potentially offsetting the benefits. Even as apparent growth occurs, understanding why costs spike remains elusive.
This is where effective cloud cost management steps in. Businesses require smart FinOps strategies to manage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) expenses and rein in Software as a Service (SaaS) expenditures. Cloud cost management solutions have become indispensable allies.
In this article, we delve into effective cloud cost optimization practices, offering insights to build a strategy that reduces cloud expenses while maximizing value.
An Overview of Cloud Cost Optimization
Cloud cost optimization is a process that involves analyzing the costs of your cloud usage, identifying areas for improvement, and making changes to reduce your costs.
The cloud has made it easier for IT organizations to scale their computing needs in minutes. But with this flexibility comes additional complexity, which can make it difficult to manage costs.
Cloud cost optimization can help you get the most out of your cloud services without spending too much money. The goal is to optimize your cloud usage to align with your business objectives while minimizing cost and risk.
Visibility and Control: Managing Cloud Expenses with Observability and Governance
Navigating cloud expenses can be complex, but you can take control and make informed decisions with the right tools.
Let’s explore how observability and governance work together to help you manage your cloud costs.
Gaining Clarity Through Observability
The first step in controlling cloud spending is gaining visibility into your organization’s cloud use. That means determining what you’re paying for, who’s using it, and how much it costs.
This kind of visibility will help you make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts regarding cost control.
Making Smart Choices with Data-Driven Decisions
Once your organization has better understood its cloud use, you can make data-driven decisions about which services to use and which ones might be better suited for other purposes.
By making smart choices about which services are right for your organization, you’ll increase efficiency while lowering costs and improving productivity and innovation throughout the organization.
Simplifying the Complexities of Cloud Spending
The cloud is a great way to manage costs, but it’s easy to get lost in many features, services, and pricing options.
To gain control over your cloud spending, you need visibility into the entire lifecycle of your cloud projects. It would help if you also had insight into where budgets are going, who’s using them, and what they’re being used for.
By taking a data-driven approach to cost management, you can make smarter decisions about your cloud investments and avoid unnecessary costs.
Benefits of Optimizing Cloud Costs
The cloud offers several benefits and advantages over traditional IT infrastructure, including cost savings and scalability.
But how do you achieve those benefits? Is there a certain way to do it? The answer is yes.
Here are 10 ways to optimize your cloud costs:
Cost Savings
One of the biggest benefits of optimizing cloud costs is that it can help you save money. Cloud providers offer resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means you only pay for what you use.
This makes it easy to control your costs and avoid unnecessary spending.
Efficient Resource Allocation
Another benefit of optimizing cloud costs is efficient resource allocation.
When you use a third-party provider to host your data and applications, they handle hardware maintenance and upgrades so that your IT staff doesn’t have to worry about them anymore — freeing them up for other tasks like creating new products or services for clients.
This also reduces downtime due to hardware failure because another backup system will always be available if one fails unexpectedly.
Improved Budget Management
Optimizing costs allows you to spend less on IT services and infrastructure, meaning you’ll have more money available for other business areas.
This gives you better control over your budget, allowing you to plan for the future more accurately.
Enhanced Financial Forecasting
The better you know how much it costs to run your cloud environment, the more accurate your forecasts will be.
If you’re spending less than expected on IT services and infrastructure, this will also help improve your financial forecasting.
Scalability without Overspending
The cloud offers the ability to scale up or down resources as needed without spending money on hardware or software.
This helps you manage costs and avoid overselling, which can lead to overspending.
Competitive Advantage
Your competitors may be using the same cloud provider as you, but they don’t know how much they’re paying or what they’re paying for — because they aren’t optimizing their cloud costs!
By knowing how much your competitors spend on AWS or Azure, you can better understand where they might be vulnerable, allowing you to capitalize on their mistakes and offer better pricing or features to win over customers.
Optimized ROI
If your company has invested in a big project or initiative like migrating to the cloud, ensuring it’s as cost-effective as possible makes sense.
By optimizing cloud costs, you can ensure that any investment in a new technology won’t be wasted through unnecessary spending on IT services or infrastructure.
Strategies for Optimizing Your Cloud Costs
The cloud can be a cost-effective way to deploy and manage your application, but it can also be an expensive way to do so. If careless, you could spend more than necessary on cloud resources.
The good news is that there are strategies you can use to optimize your cloud costs and keep them under control.
Here are some tips for doing just that:
Rightsizing Resources
It’s important to right-size your resources before you launch an application in the cloud. Launching a database server that’s too small, for example, can become overloaded and crash.
The same goes for other applications and virtual machines (VMs). You should also consider how many VMs are needed to support each workload.
For example, if you have a large database server with a lot of memory but only one VM, consider splitting the database into two smaller VMs to be scaled independently if necessary.
Implementing Auto-Scaling
Auto-scaling allows you to automatically increase or decrease capacity as needed in response to changing conditions, such as traffic spikes or seasonal changes in demand.
Utilizing Spot Instances
Spot instances are instances that Amazon EC2 provides at a discounted price because other customers are not actively using them.
They’re ideal for workloads that can be interrupted or paused if demand increases and cost savings are based on the instance’s utilization rate.
You should also consider using Spot instances if you need high availability or disaster recovery options.
Choosing Cost-Effective Storage
The storage cost depends on several factors: availability, durability, and redundancy.
For instance, storing data in multiple availability zones or regions can increase performance and costs significantly.
You should therefore determine which type of storage works best for your business needs and compare it against other options before making a purchase decision.
Using Reserved Instances
Reserved instances allow you to purchase capacity for a set period at a discounted rate. This is a good option if your usage increases or decreases over time.
You can also purchase multiple years at once and get even bigger discounts.
Embracing Serverless Architecture
Serverless architecture means you don’t have to worry about running and maintaining servers because they’re managed by someone else (in this case, Amazon).
It’s less expensive than running your servers because no underlying infrastructure needs maintenance.
The tradeoff is that you lose some control over how the servers run and what they do — but if that doesn’t matter to your business, this could be an attractive option for keeping costs down.
Deleting Unused Resources
One of the easiest ways to reduce cloud costs is deleting unused resources. If you no longer need a particular resource (such as a virtual machine), then there’s no reason for it to continue drawing money from your budget.
So make sure you regularly check in on all your resources and delete any that aren’t being used anymore.
Leveraging Cloud Cost Management Tools
You can also use cloud cost management tools to help identify unused resources in your account.
These tools can scan your account and identify unused assets so they can be deleted and removed from your bill.
Implement Resource Tagging
The easiest way to optimize your cloud costs is by implementing resource tagging.
When you tag resources, they appear in the billing and cost-analysis reports. This makes it easier to compare resources across different accounts and track usage over time.
Monitoring and Analyzing Usage
Cloud usage can vary widely from month to month, so it’s important to monitor how much you’re spending and where those costs are coming from.
Use usage reports or other monitoring tools to track consumption over time and ensure that any spikes in consumption don’t go unnoticed or unchecked.
Elevating Cloud Excellence with Taikun’s Cost Optimization
Maximizing Cloud Investments with Cost Optimization and Observability isn’t just words – it’s smart business. Taikun, our cloud ace, makes it real. With Taikun, you get seamless automation and a whole toolbox for smooth operations. Taikun doesn’t just manage; it supercharges. From easy app handling to keeping costs lean, Taikun’s got it. As the cloud keeps evolving, Taikun is your partner in progress, making sure your cloud investments turn into success stories.
