What Is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is the process by which you balance the value and need for cloud computing services within your business against the cost of these services. Cloud computing has become increasingly popular as businesses derive value from the flexibility and scalability of migrating their data and applications to the cloud. However, these benefits can quickly evaporate if your cloud bills start spiraling out of control. Cloud cost optimization allows you to continue to enjoy the benefits of the cloud, while keeping your IT costs to a minimum.
Cloud Cost Optimization FAQs
Why is Cloud Cost Optimization Important?
Simply put, with cloud cost optimization, you get to keep more of your profits. Cloud cost optimization helps to eliminate wasted, under-utilized and idle cloud infrastructure. With an on-premises server, the bulk of your investment is upfront. Most cloud service providers offer a pay-as-you-go cloud service deployment model. With this pay-as-you-go model, it’s very easy for your engineering team to spin up cloud resources for development and testing environments as they need. The issue is that once the testing is complete, you need to remember to turn off these extra cloud resources. Once you provision cloud resources, you are on the hook for the entire cloud bill at the end of the month, whether you’re still using it or not. There are certain best practices, however, to ensure you keep your cloud spending under control.
What are Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices?
Identify and Eliminate Idle Cloud Resources
Your production cloud resources are the lifeline of your organization. On the other hand, your development, testing, pre-production and other non-production cloud resources may be the reason why your cloud bill seems to be getting higher and higher each month. While these non-production cloud resources are critical for your engineering team to continue improving your product or service, it’s important to turn them off when not in use. You pay for all resources deployed unto the cloud, not just the ones you’re actively using. You can reduce your cloud spending by ensuring you’re actually using all the cloud infrastructure that you’ve provisioned for your organization.
Rightsizing
Your cloud computing needs evolve as your business grows and changes over time. Do you still need to provision that many VMs and instances now as you did when you were still growing and defining your place in the market? Now that your organization is more stable, it’s time to look at how much space you really need to support your data and applications in the cloud. Reducing the size of one instance can save you as much as 50% on costs. Rightsizing allows you to match the size of your cloud infrastructure to your real-time cloud computing and storage demands.
Consider Reserved Instances
Cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure provide cost savings when you reserve instances ahead of time. Reserved instances can be especially helpful if you know your long-term cloud computing needs ahead of time. You simply pay for future cloud resources at a much-reduced rate right now. This in turn lowers your cloud spending over time.
Develop a Heat Map
A heat map gives you much needed insight into how well you’re utilizing your cloud computing resources. By partnering with Silk, you get Silk Clarity, an intuitive resource visualization tool that tells you exactly how much cloud computing capacity you’re using. This detailed view into your cloud resources is essential if you want to determine how best to optimize your cloud resources.
Develop a Cloud Strategy
Developing a robust cloud strategy may harken the days of tight cost control with on-premises servers. After all, the ease of spinning up cloud resources when you need it is one of its best features. However, a good cloud strategy will save you significantly in the long run. A good cloud strategy ensures you are only paying for the cloud resources that you actually need.
It is also important to select the cloud deployment model that works best for your business. You might decide that sticking with a public cloud is best for you to save on costs. A private cloud will be pricier but provides tighter security and dedicated access. Or, to gain the best of both worlds, you may consider a multi cloud or hybrid cloud strategy.
Shop Around
Each public cloud platform has a wide array of services and instances available. You should carefully weigh each of these features and services before moving forward with a particular cloud service provider. In particular, weigh the benefit of each feature to your organization versus the cost of accessing these features.
Cloud Cost Optimization with Silk
The Silk Cloud Platform not only reduces the cost of your cloud infrastructure, but it does so while supercharging your cloud performance. Silk is a virtualized layer that sits between your workloads and the underlying public cloud infrastructure. By separating cloud computing from cloud storage capacity, Silk allows you to realize maximum cloud performance without increasing your cloud spend. Which means you no longer need to overprovision cloud resources to match the performance achieved with on-premises servers. Silk enables you to reduce your cloud footprint, resulting in a significant drop in cloud costs.
The Silk Cloud Platform also offers a range of enterprise data services including deduplication, thin provisioning and zero-footprint snapshots. On the cloud, every byte counts – and every byte costs. With these data services, Silk reduces the amount of cloud infrastructure that you use through backups, copies, and duplicates. In turn, this helps to minimize your cloud services bill since you no longer need to worry about too many snapshots ballooning through your allocated resources.
