When managed properly, cloud computing can be the most cost-efficient method for using IT infrastructure as it provides pay-as-you-go packages without the need to buy, install, and maintain costly server equipment, network devices, and licenses.
But most organizations fail to create a cloud cost management strategy when embarking on their cloud journey. The complexity of handling clouds, fast-changing cloud pricing, lack of detailed insights into factors that impact costs, and the ability of business units to spin up cloud services with little or no accountability can quickly lead to unexpected and rampant cost overruns.
In this blog, we’ll discuss various cloud costs management strategies and practices that can help enterprises save money. Take a look!
The Burgeoning Pace of Cloud Adoption!
Moving to the cloud can create a host of benefits for enterprises, including reduced IT costs, more flexibility, increased efficiency, improved security, boosted performance, and the potential to innovate and develop new cloud-native capabilities. That’s the reason why the shift to cloud computing has been one of the most significant tech trends over the past few years.
Recently, Gartner conducted a research, to find cloud spending trends within the application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure markets.
According to Gartner’s Cloud Spending Research, by 2025, 51% of IT spending in these four categories will shift from traditional solutions to the public cloud, as compared to 41% in 2022. Almost two-thirds (65.9%) of spending on application software will be directed towards cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7% in 2022.
The need for Cloud Cost Management!
Cloud cost management has become an important topic for cloud providers these days and has become a new requirement for any software company. Cloud Costs Management is a concept to efficiently manage your cloudfront costing. It’s a process to understand the costs associated with your cloud and eliminate those that are unnecessary.
An automated cost governance system can help businesses in optimizing and managing cost for cloud server. When it comes to managing cloud costs, there are no shortcuts. You must strategize and make proper plans, get the basics correct, and involve your teams so they understand the importance and need to manage cloudfront costing.
Cloud Cost Management Best Practices!
Discussed here are 5 cloud cost management best practices that can help teams and enterprises to craft a well-suited cloud cost optimization strategy that links costs to specific business activities and allows teams to figure out how well the cloud budget is being spent & spread across different business verticals. Let’s take a look at these!
Take Advantage Of Spot Instances!
It is possible to reduce the cost for cloud server for less-important workloads by taking advantage of Spot instances. Spot Instances let enterprises take advantage of the unused EC2 capacity in the cloud. Through spot instances, cloud providers offer excess capacity at a massive discount to drive usage and nullify the loss of idle infrastructure.
BuildPiper enables software teams to use spot instances for running various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads.
[Good Read: Roadmap To Cloud Cost Optimization!]
Shut Down Unused Resources!
Teams must identify idle, unallocated, and underutilized virtual machines/resources using cloud cost optimization tools and platforms. Idle resources are the resources that were previously running but are now no more in use and are increasing costs. Unallocated or underutilized virtual machines (VMs) are the items that were purchased but never used.
Removing these resources that are no longer required, can significantly reduce your cloud bill. Enterprises should be using an automated system that can analyze the costs of the idle and unallocated resources in their infrastructure and provides a quick view of the overall cloud usage of their business. Once the teams have identified the idle resources, they can reduce cloud costs by shutting them down.
Detect Cloud Cost Anomalies!
The process of detecting cloud cost anomalies can be used as a tool to keep cloud costs under control. Cost anomaly detection helps teams in finding different aspects that need to be checked to keep the cloud costs under control. So, whenever there is a significant increase in the cloud cost, an alert is triggered.
This helps the DevOps teams to keep track of all the potential waste happening within the cloud environment. Detecting cloud cost anomalies helps in keeping a record of the cloud wastages that happen on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Enterprises, at times, are forced to bear huge cloud wastage which ultimately ends in high cloud spending than expected.
In 2020, respondents report that 30 percent of cloud spending was wasted, says Statista. Due to this, many enterprises consider cloud cost optimization a top priority.
Configure Fixed Schedule For Uptime Or Downtime!
Next on the list is an important practice that can help enterprises in reducing cloud costs significantly. It is the practice of specifying a fixed time for uptime and downtime of the used resources. Teams must configure fixed uptime and downtime schedules for their resources. Let’s say for instance if teams want their specific resources to be unavailable from Tuesday at 8 pm to Wednesday at 10 am, then they can specify the downtime for the selected resources for that particular period of time. During this time, the specified services will be unavailable, enabling a reduction in costs.
Configure AutoStopping Rules!
AutoStopping is a unique cloud cost intelligence feature that can automatically shut down idle VMs and containers within a cloud environment and dynamically run them on spot instances with no interruptions. This helps reduce cloud costs. Businesses can achieve this by configuring the AutoStopping feature in their platforms while managing cloud resources.
Cloud Costs Optimization with BuildPiper!
BuildPiper, a Kubernetes & Microservices delivery platform, makes Kubernetes simple & effective for application developers. Enterprises and teams can keep a check on their cloud wastage and reduce their cloud bills with cloud cost management tools such as BuildPiper as it,
- Provides regular insights into cloud utilization
- Keeps monthly cloud bills in check
- Reduces management overhead
- Precisely forecasts expenses
BuildPiper helps in reducing Cloud Costs via,
- Spot Instances for cost optimization
- Kubernetes Governance to monitor resource usage
- Kubernetes Autoscaling to allocate cloud resources
Explore this powerful DevSecOps platform and its other functionalities such as Microservices Management, Security, Compliance & Observability and Secure CI/CD Pipelines delivery, along with Managed Kubernetes for your use cases. Take a demo NOW!
