Cloud as a cost-effective option than on-premises data centers has been debatable, and for most businesses, the picture is getting more complicated. Let’s take, for example; you are leading a group of a certain number of employees, and you’re all set to incur all the financial costs and report back to the financial officer. You had already mentioned to all employees that we will be soon moving to cloud along with other business decision makers that will assist the business to cut costs. Your company has moved some or all of the projects and apps on the public cloud, and the things have running in sync, making the decision stand on its ground. Though as promised of reducing the revenue spending, it is still far from cutting costs as the attempt to figure out the monthly bills has made you just question your move. So let’s have a look at the costs part with reserved instances, on-demand costs, unblended and blended rates attempting to make sense of the bill has made you need to look for more definitions where you can optimize the cost. You are set to get in the whirlwind where the pricing structure demanded by the accountant team doesn’t completely make sense; the breakdown of the services by cost is just mind-boggling. In case of AWS cloud usage, there are at least 500,000 SKUs and price combinations in AWS alone on top of that the complete infrastructure will make your team take no limitations on who can spin the specific resources at any time that will just be compounding the problem. So the complete control over that meter which keeps running with every resource and minute terms is too proverbial. The complete approach to the cloud seems complicated, and towards the cost effectiveness, it seems to make many more detours before we could start with understanding the variety of opportunities available for the cost and performance optimization.

There are six basic wheels that you need to define your cloud optimization.

1. Reserved Instances (RI)

AWS reserved instances, Azure reserved, Google Cloud Committed, and VM instances use several discounts that cover the initial costs of cloud resources; it also allows you to estimate the upfront cost of what are you using. It provides steep discounts for pre-planning that is combined with an improved financial incentive. Most cost optimization for cloud begin here and end here, making the complete infrastructure cost optimization erroneous. Resources to estimate the RI purchases are available through the third party providers and cloud providers.  There are other two things that will affect the risk tolerance ad centralized RI management portfolios,

  • Risks Tolerance: A definite approach to your spends and gains that will be defining your resources requirements. A consumption and profitability will be two things to consider when you decide to adopt cloud as a complete data center option or other.
  • Centralized RI management: Having a centralized RI management portfolio provides you with a deeper understanding of different opportunities that will reduce your costs. However, for the whole organization, the approach will lead in developing management resource needed for successful RI management program will create future resources.

2. Robust Tagging

With cloud technology, we are in control to define our need for resources. However, the major downside in that the instant technology there is less incentive for individual team members to terminate these processes when the user is finished using the resource. Auto-parking is the process when it terminates the resources during the off-hours; such an environment is useful for development and testing. Identifying the idle resources using the robust tagging strategy means that keeping the resources in the best of shape with a robust strategy.

3. Resource Management

The best way to ensure that you are using what you need and not too little or not too much. Having the right size solutions means that you start using the cloud environment will more efficiency. However, without analyzing the resource consumption or enable chargebacks, right-sizing becomes completely meaningless. Performance and capacity requirements often change over time, and this means either underused resources or idle resources. Right-sizing means have a complete solution that implements various policies and guardrails to reduce overprovisioning, tagging resources to enable the department level chargebacks along with other major resource requirements. Right-sizing must include various factors in consideration, such as auto-parked resources and RIs available.

4. Family Refresh

Instance Families describe the method that will improve the cloud providers package for their instances. Each of the instances offering greatly differs with different variety of computing, memory, and storage parameters. Instances types that keep changing when the hardware required to keep them running is replaced by newer technology. Some tools exist that can monitor the family refresh though they might take in to account the applications of any other pillars of optimization. Family refresh is labored tasks that can completely mean overhauling the infrastructure.

5. Wastage

Many of the issues of instances running after past their usefulness means that wastage of the current resources. Waste might still seem like an abstract concept, but each of the wasted units can cost dollars. There is no limit to the number of resources that can be used, the lack of incentives for the individual or teams to minimize the resources to self regulate their resources. Identifying the resources takes time, and accurate billing will be one factor to save your costs.

6. Storage

Storage is one of the natural ways to reduce the in-house costs of hardware and infrastructure maintenance. Though cloud storage prediction is difficult to make with each resource, so expanding makes it closely impossible when it comes monitoring. Cloud storage has a pool of offerings that include data backup, recovery, and various data solutions. So right-sizing the storage and bandwidth will make solutions just another option.

Conclusion

The above six optimization factors tend to be the biggest factor contributing to cloud infrastructure resourcefulness. Public cloud providers keep modifying their pricing and services to attract new adopters, but flexibility in solutions will mean that even you will have options. Once you have devised a plan for adoption, taking into consideration various optimization through application refactoring, instances analysis, and serverless architecture, the cloud solutions should be embarked.

To know more, you can download cloud solutions whitepapers.