Optimizing the cloud environment for your organization should be the priority when looking out for helpful ingredients to increase the revenue margins. Understanding your cloud architecture would bring visibility, help cut down on over-allocation and under utilization of available cloud resources.
Cost Per (Environment, Feature, Product, Storage, Customer)
Gather your requirement for provisioning of required computing resources.
Four (4) most commmon types of cloud computing services used in industry:
- IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)
- PaaS (Platform as a service)
- SaaS (Software as a service)
- STaaS (Storage as a service)
There is no question about that adopting cloud services help businesses to keep their focus on managing, innovating and delivering their products and services. While there are many promising benefits of cloud migration but inefficient managment of cloud resources can cost and surprise the finance department of your organization. Overspending in cloud can happen if your Devops or IT team allocate more resources than the actual requirement e.g. by accepting the default options while provisioning the instances.
Let’s understand what are the major drivers of huge billing for cloud services. Cost is a dependable variable with its dependency on Computing, Storage and Networking requirements. Often times expenses increase as the storage and computing requirements increase. It gets overwhelming when your cloud provider has complex billing methods. Time to look upon the relevant cost drivers and get the maximum out of your IT Budget:
1. Over Provisioning
2. Inconsistent Tagging
3. High Performance Intensive Applications
4. Inefficient Storage Configuration
5. Underutilized Testing Environments
6. Outdated hardware generation
Optimization Strategies
- Rightsizing Instances
- Resource Tagging (Descriptive Metadata)
- Decommissioning unused Instances
- Monitoring & Analytics
- Selecting Right Cloud Service Provider
Let’s understand these points in elaborative manner:
Rightsizing Instances: This strategy is the most effective strategy when it comes to cloud cost optimization. This would not only help in curbing down the expenses but also boost the performance of your products. While provisioning Instances or VMs you should take into consideration the requirements of workload performance and capacity. It should always be considered as an ongoing process to ensure the cost performance optimization. Regular monitoring of deployed instances helps in identifying and remove the idle resouces from the infrastructure to keep it optimized. You should effectively use the monitoring tools to analyse the costs by evaluating the CPU utilization, disk I/O, network throughput, usage trends (peak and low workload intervals).
Resource Tagging: