Cloud technology has revolutionized the way companies do business. With the significant rise in cloud adoption, understanding how to manage and optimize cloud costs effectively has become increasingly critical. However, the intricacies of cloud computing often pose a challenge for many organizations.
Let's take a deep dive into the world of cloud optimization, its benefits, and the best practices to ensure efficient cloud resource utilization.
Cloud Adoption: A Double-Edged Sword
The shift towards cloud-based services, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancement in technology, has brought about incredible benefits for businesses across diverse sectors. However, the surge in cloud adoption has also brought along certain complexities.
Different cloud services come with varying costs, leading to an unexpected increase in IT spend for some organizations. Without the necessary expertise and tools, the process of cloud adoption can quickly become overwhelming and costly.
An astonishing statistic reveals that companies, on average, overspend on cloud by around 32%. As a result, enhancing efficiency and reducing this figure has become a crucial objective for many businesses.
Unraveling the Complexities of Cloud Costs
To effectively manage and optimize cloud costs, understanding the unique aspects of cloud computing and the factors driving costs is essential. This holds true for both recent adopters and seasoned users of cloud services.
The process of cloud optimization can help businesses make informed choices about the right resources for specific functions. By continuously monitoring the IT environment, cloud optimization can identify potential opportunities for cost-saving and waste reduction.
Striking the Right Balance with Cloud Optimization
In the internal hierarchy of a business, the responsibility of cloud optimization usually falls on the shoulders of the IT Operations teams. These teams are tasked with maintaining and enhancing the quality of IT services within a company.
However, as cloud spending escalates, these highly skilled DevOps and CloudOps professionals often find themselves caught in the crossfire between finance departments and engineers. The finance teams demand greater visibility of cloud costs, while application owners aim to utilize the best tools available.
To ensure the success of an organization, IT Ops needs to strike a balance between these stakeholders. Cloud optimization can aid in this process by helping to identify and maximize return on investment (ROI).
Allocating Cloud Resources Efficiently
The next step towards effective cloud optimization involves efficient allocation of cloud resources. This is achieved by weighing workload performance, compliance, and cost against the best-fit infrastructure.
To keep up with the rapid pace of technological advances, this balancing act must be an ongoing process. Applications that are continuously optimized require less maintenance and supporting infrastructure, thereby delivering maximum value for cloud spend.
The Importance of Cloud Management
While cloud computing offers significant opportunities for organizations to scale and innovate, it can also lead to issues such as overprovisioning, underused assets, and inadequate data storage.
Cloud management is the key to unlocking the ability to optimize these resources. It involves monitoring key operational metrics such as service availability, response time, throughput, and capacity.
Once the data is available, informed decisions can be made. If cost savings is the goal, an objective can be set to identify and switch off redundant server instances or evaluate the ROI from the current price plan.
Objectives of Cloud Optimization
Cloud optimization can serve various objectives, including:
- Ensuring multi-cloud environments run as efficiently as possible
- Establishing a clear cloud governance structure
- Changing storage types to better match workloads
- Taking advantage of the energy-saving and costs saving capabilities of the latest compute processor technologies
Best Practices for Cloud Optimization
To plan a successful cloud optimization project, focus on the following steps:
- Gain Visibility Over Your Cloud Environment: Start by collecting data. If you use a cloud service provider like Microsoft Azure or AWS, robust reporting tools may already be available to you. Alternatively, working with a cloud optimization specialist can help you discover the most impactful stats.
- Measure the Metrics That Matter: Although many companies target overspending, there's no obligation to reduce costs. Increasing cloud spending in the right areas can positively impact revenue and application performance. Define your organization's priorities and understand how cloud optimization can support them.
- Rightsize Your Resources: Sometimes, the incorrect instance size or type is selected for cloud resource users. Additionally, resources might be spun up for a project and then forgotten, leaving them running idle. These missteps can lead to oversized, expensive instances and wasted computing power.
- Incorporate Automation: Leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like AWS CloudFormation to automate infrastructure provisioning is one of the most efficient ways to work in the cloud. This approach can reduce manual tasks, minimize human errors, and improve your cloud continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline.
- Review Pricing Plans: The multitude of pricing options in cloud computing can be confusing. To reduce cloud spend, organizations should consider Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, which offer discounts of up to 70% compared to On-demand pricing. These options are ideal for long-running and steady-state workloads.
- Continually Monitor and Improve: Cloud optimization is most effective when carried out as a continuous exercise. Incorporate the process into your overall cloud strategy, monitor the most relevant metrics, and switch to more appropriate ones as your business objectives change.
Benefits of Cloud Optimization
Cost and Service Alignment
Cloud optimization enhances efficiency by rightsizing resources to match application and workload requirements. With real-time visibility over your spending and usage information, organizations can align costs with business KPIs and link spending to ROI. Data-driven insights then allow users to evaluate and modify each service offering until it matches their specific needs.
Reduced Cloud Spend
Monitoring cloud costs provides powerful oversight of your infrastructure. Most companies could see a cloud cost reduction of between 20-30% following optimization.
Better Cloud Application Performance
If you've provisioned too many resources, or have excess traffic on your network, things might run a bit sluggishly. Cloud optimization can identify opportunities to remove or cut down on resources, enabling organizations to run workloads more efficiently.
Increased Productivity
With more control over infrastructure, organizations can predict and respond to issues much faster. An optimized environment and automated processes also allow developers to spend more time building new products and experiences for end users.
Improved Cloud Utilization
The sheer number of cloud solutions can be overwhelming. For example, AWS offers over 200 fully-featured services. Continuous cloud optimization makes it easier to track which features are essential to your business operations. It also enables you to take advantage of practices like auto-scaling to dynamically adjust cloud resources according to a workload's demands.
Cloud Optimization with Heline
Heline's cloud optimization services offer tailored strategies to help your business maximize its IT environment.
Whether you need a single point-in-time consultancy engagement for identifying quick wins, or an ongoing managed service to deliver architectural changes that reduce costs and improve sustainability, our experts have got you covered.
Our team will leverage a mix of cloud-native tools, best practices, and real-world experience to optimize cost, storage, network, computing power, and operations - allowing you to maximize performance and reduce expenditure.
