No matter where your company is at in their cloud journey, optimizing cloud costs continues to be a concern especially when it comes to cloud waste. As companies continue to move more workloads to the cloud, it becomes easier to lose sight of the costs associated with it. While you may be decreasing hardware costs and decreasing your overall IT costs, they are not disappearing altogether.
Keep in mind, costs may be moving from capex to opex, which can make them more manageable, but it also means they will look different. Instead of dealing with $60,000 in hardware, there is a minimal monthly cost to rent server space from Microsoft, for example.
Here are 5 best practices for cost optimization.
#1 – Don’t try to optimize everything. You will want to review and consider everything, but you may find somethings are better off left as is. The main things you’ll want to look at are usage and capacity. These should be leading indicators of whether or not something would benefit from being optimized.
#2 – Use auto-scaling services. When possible, make sure to leverage auto-scaling services to be able to scale up and down on-demand to accommodate unexpected spikes and to be able to save on downtime. Auto-scaling can help create predictable performance over time at the lowest possible cost and allow you to see any unusual activity.
#3 – Take advantage of prepaid discounts. Especially in cases where you have historical data and can predict usage over time, it is encouraged to evaluate prepaid discounts such as Hybrid Benefits and Reserved VM Instances for Microsoft Azure. These can provide you with significant savings over the course of a year and the option to still pay monthly allows it to be cost-effective for any size company.
#4 – Make a budget. If you don’t have a budget for you cloud costs, creating one is a good start. This can be used to both help you optimize your cloud costs to save money and it can be a good tool to compare costs month to month to see what has changed.
#5 – Use a management tool. Tools like MyCloudIT can be a great tool to not only manage your cloud costs, but also optimize from a single platform.
Download the Cloud Optimization Checklist to Help You Get Started
Tags: Cost Optimization
