9 Best Practices for Cloud Cost Optimization
If you haven’t optimized your cloud, you’re probably not spending your money in the right ways. Azure cost management best practices and AWS cost optimization best practices have a lot of overlap; when you’re working with the cloud, you should optimize it. And if you don’t optimize it, your spending can quickly get away from you. Today, we’re going to look at 9 important best practices for optimizing your cloud costs.
What is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud cost optimization shouldn’t be confused with cloud cost reduction. If you’re spending $10,000 on the cloud and you’ve budgeted $10,000 on the cloud, you don’t need to spend more. You need to know that you’re getting more. Similar to advertising or any other revenue-generating expense, your goal should be to ensure that you’re getting the most that you can out of the money that you’re spending. This is when cloud optimization comes in.
A managed services provider can help you with your cloud optimization by helping you analyze and improve upon your costs.
1. Regularly Audit Your Cloud Costs
Let’s begin with the obvious. Many companies find that they are paying too much for their cloud because they haven’t performed an audit in some time. Over time, cloud costs build organically and are not always applied to the right line items. Audit your cloud costs to identify areas where you may be overpaying or underpaying, overperforming or underperforming.
As you audit your cloud costs, take a look at the areas that you feel are gaps or potential overlaps. It’s possible that you have multiple cloud systems essentially performing the same tasks — common with administration or security utilities. It’s also possible there are areas of your cloud development that you need to improve or shore up to become truly effective.
2. Create Cross-Functional Teams
Administration, developers and users may have different ideas regarding where money should be spent. While they may all be right in their own way, it’s the employees on the ground who are most likely to see where cloud costs need to be going — with some guidance from administrators and supervisors. Creating cross-functional teams means that you are less likely to deploy your cash to areas where it’s not needed and more likely to see the areas where improvement is required.
3. Create Processes for Requisitioning and Decommissioning
Why do organizations have unused or inactive resources? Because they don’t have the right systems or processes in place. Enforce stricter controls when resources are requisitioned and ensure that they are properly decommissioned when they are no longer necessary. By enforcing stricter standards, organizations can reduce the chances that shadow resources remain.
4. Right-Size Resources with Sizing Tools
From Microsoft Azure to AWS, modern cloud solutions come with right-sizing tools that can then be leveraged by administration. Right-sizing ensures that instances and systems are utilizing the right number of resources and can often be a more efficient pathway toward cloud cost optimization than manual analysis.
5. Locate Unused or Inactive Resources
Identify and remove unused or inactive resources periodically. Set up processes that are designed to identify these resources and remove them frequently, so these resources aren’t left lingering within the system. The more rigorous your organization’s processes, the less likely resources will be left behind.
6. Consolidate Resources When Idle
Setup resource consolidation for idle systems. While these resources may not be decommissionable, they may not need to utilize as many resources as they are. An example: organizations may want to have a multi-layered system where the most active resources have the highest availability and the least active resources have the lowest levels of availability. If there are systems that are only required to be used once a year, they don’t need to be kept in the front and center.
7. Analyze System Usage with Visual Tools
It can be difficult to really understand the way that a system is being used without data visualizations. Heat maps, in particular, make it easier to identify potential hotspots before they become disruptive. As you start to see system load heading in a single direction, you can start to balance it and adjust it before it becomes a problem. Looking at raw numbers may not help, but looking at a map or a graph might. Often, administrators cannot make the adjustments they need because the data isn’t being presented in a way that’s understandable.
8. Leverage Built-In Optimization Technologies
Azure cost management best practices and AWS cost optimization best practices will always include the tools that are available with the platform. Foremost, the platform-specific tools are designed to operate within the existing infrastructure, so they will be tailor-made and customized for that infrastructure. A secondary bonus is that these optimization technologies are built-in, so they won’t cost the organization more money. At minimum, try these before paying for a separate cloud cost optimization tool.
9. Consider Multi-Cloud vs. Single-Cloud Solutions
Many organizations naturally gravitate toward multi-cloud solutions. They add more solutions organically when they need additional tools. But under robust architectures and infrastructures like Microsoft Azure or AWS, it’s possible to create a single cloud solution that will do everything for your organization.
An MSP can run multiple scenarios regarding your multi-cloud or single-cloud solutions. Sometimes, you can save a significant amount of money by moving to a single-cloud solution while also optimizing the resources that are available to you. Often, single-cloud solutions will operate more effectively with the same amount of money as a multi-cloud solution because they are so well-integrated.
It shouldn’t be assumed that you cannot get the features that you need with a single-cloud solution, especially now when single-cloud solutions also come with so many add-ons, customizations and integrations.
Do You Need to Optimize Your Cloud Costs?
Regardless of your expenses and optimization, a cloud infrastructure is nearly always a cost savings. If you feel that you’re not getting enough from your cloud — if you aren’t getting the bang for the buck — then you may need to embark on cloud cost optimization. But that’s not always easy to do alone. Most cloud optimization starts with an audit. A third-party audit is often essential.
At Red River, we can go over your existing cloud costs and apply our many years of knowledge and experience to develop the right solutions. Contact us at Red River to find out more.
