7 ways to optimize cloud costs

Do you know what keeps Cloud Administrators up at night? Yes, you guessed it right. Cloud bills !!! These unpredictable cloud bills.

With the recent allure of the “pay-per-use” model of the public cloud, organizations over-use and over-spend on cloud resources. Especially with this unrestrained freedom to create new instances on the go, mitigating cloud costs is a daunting task, even for the early and heavy adopters of public clouds.

To add to the complexity, modern IT and engineering teams adopt a multi-cloud strategy to prevent vendor lock-in and build failsafe systems. Gartner reports that global spending on public cloud services will hit an insane mark of $600 billion this year.

Considering all the money being poured into public cloud services, is it time to ask whether you are spending wisely?

The best way to control Cloud spending and avoid traps organizations get into is by building a disciplined process. Here’s what you have to do to keep your cloud environment under check.

1. Monitor Monthly Cloud Bills –  First up, analyze monthly bills effectively, and narrow down any unexpected services and orphaned resources. This not only helps to spot cloud waste but also empowers you to assess whether the deployed resources are required and add value to your IT Infrastructure. Be stingy with your cloud spending. The faster your hand reaches for your pocket, the deeper its hole will be. 

2. Closer look at Spikes and Anomalies – But before that, do you have a blueprint of your cloud strategy in place? If not, what are you waiting for? The next step is to map the frequency and intensity of your cloud resources on a wall (figuratively) and observe where they hit the ceiling or floor. These are some points of inflection that could use some smart optimization.

3. Find out the Zombie resources –  Of course, the real zombies never sleep! In our case, it’s not ideal to leave cloud resources always on. The public cloud uses a pay-what-you-consume model. So if you spin up cloud resources and don’t turn them off when not in use (during weekends or weeknights), you’ll end up burning a hole in your pocket without even realizing it.

4. Compute the Costs of Your Network Traffic – You don’t bring a needle to a sword fight. And, of course, vice versa. Cloud resources are billed on the hourly rate of machines. And as logic dictates, smaller machines are cheaper than their larger counterparts. While using smaller machines is an obvious initial reflex, you can even deploy a scale-out architecture that uses multiple and smaller resources.

5. Consider Cost Differences by Location – Have you ever been to two different McDonald’s and paid different prices for the same happy meal? The same is possible with Cloud services. Prices naturally depend on input variables, labor costs, and market fluctuations. Whatever the case, don’t jump the gun without a fair share of due diligence.

6. Rightsizing the cloud resources for scalability – We’ve all had that time of year when we realize we’ve overspent, even if we didn’t mean to. Rightsizing brings everything back on track and on budget.  Choose the right type of workloads and volumes that meet your business needs. Check if the cloud resources that you are currently managing are really needed. The workload can be downgraded to save money if it’s surplus to requirements.

   Here’s a small tip you can try out 💡

   Before making any decision, time-travel into the future. What would be your cloud needs 2, 5, or even 10 years from now? The efficiency with which you answer these questions directly correlates to cloud costs down the road. With cloud orchestration,  containers, and microservices in the picture today, tipping the decision in favor of one factor may enrage another.

7. Everyone takes ownership of their cloud spend –  Without appropriate transparency and ownership of the cloud spend, organizations lack a complete picture of how much their products are really costing. The visibility of their cloud spending should be provided to the product teams and made accountable for managing cloud usage against their own budget. 

Which is the most nagging issue related to public cloud costs that you are facing? Share your thoughts with us. Also, If you are interested in learning about Freshservice Cloud management capabilities, do check out here.