Cost Optimization on your Cloud Infrastructure
Optimization on the cloud sets forth several benefits that not just maximize an organization’s efficiency and value but also reduce IT costs and business risks. Reducing overconsumption of cloud resources that in turn reduces cloud spends, providing reserved capacity storage for better discounts, and scaling computing services with the right sizing approach are some impactful ways of optimizing on the cloud. Different cloud service providers offer unlimited scalability and lower IT costs by extending the pay-as-you-go model where organizations are charged for only those resources that are used within a limited period. Cost optimizations help businesses to reduce spending on unwanted resource utilization. Let us look at a few techniques that help manage cloud resources while optimizing costs as well:
Top Six Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies
1. Reduce Unused Resources
The first step is to look for inactive resources when optimizing cloud costs. There can often be times when developers or administrators deploy temporary servers to perform some functions but may leave them unused after their task completion. In such scenarios, administrators may fail to disconnect or withdraw the storage they wanted to terminate after their temporary use.
Thus, these storages remain attached to instances.
When a cloud cost optimization strategy is designed, it is most important to identify the unused and autonomous resources to subsequently be able to remove them.
Activities:
- Terminate the instances that are not getting utilized after a given point of time.
- After terminating the unused servers, check and disconnect all the attached resources.
2. Reduce Idle Resources
When the traffic is low, servers get underutilized, but customers keep paying for all the resources irrespective of usage. Physically scaling up by adding new resources to the data center when required, is not only challenging but also inefficient and highly expensive. However, this is where the cloud comes to the rescue offering several features like load balancing and autoscaling. It also provides on-demand capabilities that enable you to scale up your computing systems as and when needed.
Cost stationing has experienced a dynamic trend when it comes to computing demands. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a start and end time to shut down instances or development servers over weekends, either manually or via automation to significantly reduce costs. Leveraging automation to schedule instances is a better way of optimizing cloud costs.
Activities:
- Analyse the CPU utilization pattern for instances and execute start/stop instances when an underutilized pattern occurs. You can either do it weekly or monthly, based on your needs.
3. Resource Right-Sizing for Computing Services
When we talk of resource right-sizing, it is a process related to the analysis of computing services where users can modify and customize their requirements to attain an efficient and ideal size of resources. In addition to server sizes, there are servers optimized for memory, database, computing, storage capacity, and more as the tools can help recommend changes wherever necessary. This not just helps reduce costs but also encourages optimization on the cloud. Paying for the required resources helps organizations obtain peak performances on the cloud.
Activities:
- Analyse the patterns of memory and CPU utilization to recommend smaller sized resources that can help reduce costs without hampering computational services.
4. Purchase Reserved Instances
Enterprises committing long-term to the cloud should look at investing in reserved instances, which usually yield bigger discounts. It will depend on factors like time commitment and upfront payment. Since RI purchase is usually for a one- or three-years duration, it is essential to analyze your past usage and accordingly plan for future requirements.
Activities:
- Calculate the cost for each resource and compare it with the latest upfront cost. Recommend only if the upfront cost is lesser than the current estimated cost.
5. Invest on Spot Instances
There are several differences between spot and reserved instances. Spot instances can be availed through auction, you can purchase them instantly when the price is best, and it can be used with immediate effect. However, spot instances are available for very short durations and can be aborted with as little as 30-second notice making it best suited for computing cases like batch jobs that can be finished quickly. All large-sized companies utilize spot instances as a vital part of their cloud cost optimization strategy.
Activities:
- Calculate the cost of resources after discount and compare it with the current cost.
6. Upcoming feature – Multi-Cloud vs. Single Cloud cost optimization
When you switch between different platforms, there can be hassles like the need to pay for network traffic between clouds and/or training your staff on how different clouds function.
Activities:
- Analyse and compare the cost of resources on each cloud.
- Recommend similar workloads on a different cloud that costs lesser or perform workload migration onto a different cloud.
- Recommend distributed workloads on multi-cloud. A scaling server, which is less expensive, can be set up on the secondary cloud. This works out to be more cost effective than setting up a primary cloud.
- Recommend specific resources which are more reasonable on a different cloud as compared to the primary cloud.
Conclusion
Cloud renders great potential and several advantages with guaranteed cost savings. Nonetheless, it is essential to prioritize cloud cost optimization from the beginning and organizations need to be always mindful of it. The CloudEnsure solutions for cloud cost optimization can help customers reduce their monthly bills significantly. CloudEnsure’s automated tools along with its user-friendly interface can save spends, time, and effort invested while ensuring optimum billing on the cloud.