Cost optimization has become a major issue for many engineering teams as companies increasingly build in the cloud. While cloud providers such as AWS provide flexibility and scalability, cloud costs are frequently opaque and difficult to track.
As a result, many cloud-reliant businesses are implementing cloud cost optimization strategies to better understand and control the costs of their cloud-based systems while maximizing cloud efficiency and usage. To support this push, a number of platforms, best practices, and cloud solutions addressing cloud cost optimization have emerged.
What Is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is a set of strategies, techniques, best practices, and tools that help reduce cloud costs while also increasing the business value of using the cloud.
It entails increasing cloud cost efficiency by identifying and reducing mismanaged or excess resources, taking advantage of discounts to reserve more capacity, and rightsizing computing resources in your cloud environment to specific applications and workloads.
What is the difference between cloud cost optimization vs. cloud cost management?
While cloud cost management focuses on allocating, tracking, reporting, and analyzing cloud spending, cloud cost optimization applies those insights to determine how to maximize business value at the lowest possible cost.
Optimizing cloud costs entails more than just cost reduction; it also entails aligning costs with business objectives. An increase in costs is not always a bad thing if it is accompanied by an increase in revenue.
Best Practices To Optimize Your Cloud Costs
Follow these best practices to develop a cloud cost optimization strategy that connects costs to specific business activities so you can see who, what, why, and how your cloud budget is being spent.
Set up your account for monitoring
Set up a master AWS organization payer account if you haven’t already. As you add new account members, make sure their cost data is added to the master account. The company’s total cloud spending will then have a single source of truth. Separate accounts make it difficult to track future cloud costs. You can also check how to do data protection of your work through some easy steps.
Work on capturing context next. AWS generates a large amount of telemetry from sources such as CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC flow logs. All of these provide context for what’s going on in the system. Your team must ensure that this context is collected in order to link it to billing.
Make cost the first-class metric
You can accomplish this by spreading awareness of cloud costs throughout the organization and making it simple for everyone on the development team to see and understand actual costs. When making engineering decisions, keep cost in mind. To make cost data easier to understand, ensure that:
- It is up to date.
- It is contextual.
- It is quantifiable.
- There is a clear distinction between what is good and what is bad.
There are several key metrics that pertain to cloud cost:
Unit Costs: Determine your unit cost: does it cost per API call or cost per report? Everyone should understand what factors affect the cost and how unit cost affects your bottom line, regardless of the unit.
Idle cost: Determine your system’s baseline cost with no customer load. This is a broad measure of your effectiveness. Knowing your idle cost can help you decide whether a change in architecture is worthwhile in terms of the savings you can realize.
Shared infrastructure- Shared systems can provide cost savings or engineering efficiencies, but they make it difficult to allocate costs across multiple teams. Large organizations should think about how to charge back or account for shared costs.
Make timely cost decisions with real-time analytics
Team members who have timely access to the right data can make timely changes that affect the bottom line and product quality. You don’t want to miss out on cost-cutting opportunities.
Rather, you should keep an eye on cost indicators as they change. You’ll be able to see if your expenses are trending normally or if there are any unusual activities that could lead to overspending.
Rightsize your cloud computing resources
Finding, reviewing, and modifying cloud resources to meet the specific needs of individual workloads and applications is what right-sizing entails. Servers can be appropriately sized for processing, storage, memory, throughput, graphics, databases, and other purposes.
How do I reduce my cloud cost?
Seven methods for reducing cloud costs
- Recognizing mismanaged resources
- Cost anomalies should be monitored.
- Reduce costs by using auto-scaling.
- Make use of reserved instances (RI)
- Consider migrating to a microservices environment. Use heat maps to visualize.
- What’s going on in your system?
- Get rid of shadow IT practices.
Read Also: How Do I Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Without Site
