Cloud Cost Optimization: To Cut Off Half your Cloud Billing

Businesses can’t even imagine eliminating the cloud for a moment! G2 statistics stated that the annual cloud spend of 80% of companies is nearly 1.2 million USD, and some large-scale enterprises spend up to 12 million USD. Here, the cost alone does not matter; all that matters is how profoundly you organize the cloud infrastructure and how it brings you ROI.

Don’t overspend your hard-earned money on the cloud, spend right! With the right cloud cost optimization strategy and technique, you can save in bulk and also use the cloud architecture to its full potential.

What is cloud cost optimization?

Cloud cost optimization is a methodology that comes with tactics, strategies, and tools to minimize cloud spend and maximize business efficiency. It helps identify the most cost-effective way to run workloads and applications.

It lets you recognize unused tools, overused resources, and a lot more, which increases the bill size. With intelligent adjustments, you can considerably reduce the number of billing pages.

Best Practices to Optimize your cloud cost 

The cloud environment is capricious. Workloads keep coming and going, and the interesting thing is that not all the workloads are the same. It is an ever-changing environment. Cloud platforms also make changes to the pricing as well as the features. Due to complex infrastructure and its dynamic nature, cloud cost optimization requires keen analysis, best practices, intelligent tools, and detailed metrics.

Also Read: How to implement data lake in AWS

The best cloud cost optimization methods 

#1 Fix Budget  

Set budgets for all the stages of our SDLC. Never choose some four- or five-digit number randomly, calculate and fix the average monthly budget. It makes you aware of the money spent, which is important for overall spending and cloud cost optimization.

Plan accordingly based on your workloads, features, and software license; it may exceed or be less than your actual billing. But setting a budget is the most crucial step. 

#2 Don’t pay for Unused resources. Additionally  

By recognizing unused resources, you can save really big on your cloud spending. At times, Developers use temporary servers to test the product and may forget to close them.

Most cloud platforms use the pay-as-you-go principle, and of course, you need to pay for unused resources additionally.

#3 Avoid Idle Resources  

Some companies leave some resources idle to make use of them during sales seasons and sudden spikes. but you also have to pay it for the rest of the month. Organizations can use auto-scaling and load balancing to scale up their resources automatically.

Identify the idle resources, group them, and cut them from your expenses. 

#4 Right sizing for right pricing  

Don’t plant bonsai in a garden and leave curry in a pot! Scale everything. size everything from memory, computing power, data, servers, and everything. Of course, it’s hard to do it manually, but there are some right-sizing tools out there. These tools send you timely notifications regarding any changes.  

With appropriate usage, you can achieve excellence in everything.

#5 Consider Microservice Environment  

Embracing a microservice environment is the most impactful thing for an organization. Most of the products and software will undergo application modernization to withstand the competitive world. In those scenarios, or whenever any issues occur in the single element, the developer needs to handle the whole thing to fix the issue or upgrade the single feature.

This microservice environment saves costs as well as time and resources.

#6 Reserve Reserved Instances (RIs) 

Reserved Instances lets you save big up to 75%, but you must pay it before using it. If you have a steady workload, reserve it for a specific period of time with an advance payment.

Anyhow, you have to pay your bills. Why not pay it in advance and save. Major cloud players like AWS and Azure are providing this service. You can look at your past cloud expenditures and plan accordingly. 

#7 Save form Savings Plans 

The customizable Savings Plan pricing structure can help you reduce your AWS usage by up to 70%. Similar to RIs, this method offers fixed pricing with one- or three-year contracts.

#8 Use heatmaps so you don’t heat up!

A heatmap is a tool that you can use to visualize the peak and throughput of computing demands. With this data, you can shut down the unused servers and resources for a specific timeline and save them.

#9 Monitor cost Anomalies 

Set spending limits, anticipate AWS charges, and reduce overall cloud expenditures by using the Cost Management Console. This tool has a Cost Anomaly Detection feature that uses machine learning to track usage, prices and spot unusual spending patterns. You can configure alerts to inform you when spending exceeds or approaches predetermined thresholds. When you identify the underlying reason for an anomaly, you can take action to prevent additional expenses from occurring and stay within your budget. 

#10 Utilize Real time Analytics 

Real-time analytics can help every team in the organization. Thus, the right information at the right time helps organizations perform well and make better decisions.

How can continuum innovations help with cloud cost optimization? 

Continuum Innovations is a profound cloud solutions provider. We love to assist organizations and deliver optimal solutions to improve business performance. Our cloud engineers understand your business values at their root and come up with the perfect cloud cost optimization practices. You can reach us at any time and share your requirements.