In my experience, unmanaged cloud costs can quickly escalate. Apart from rising costs, wasted capacity and pressure from the business to curb costs, there may be underlying issues that will negatively affect application performance. The solution is proper cost management, which includes understanding your cloud spend and reaping benefits beyond cost savings.
In this blog, I look at three key reasons for cloud cost optimisation and the benefits they’ll bring to your organisation.
Improved cost management leads to better financial planning and predictability, which is essential for long-term strategic planning – that is a fact. When it comes to cloud costs, certainty around spend helps to ensure that allocated budgets are used effectively. Reducing excess cloud costs also promotes reinvestment into other strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation.
Cloud costs stability can be improved by doing the following:
When migrating to the cloud, some applications might not be fully cloud capable. In addition, technical debt – prioritising speed over quality – becomes more apparent, as it’s often masked in the on-host situation. This results in inefficient applications that are unable to consistently deliver the required performance, stability and scalability.
Additionally, this is exacerbated due to a sharper focus on ensuring patterns of deployment that support availability, resilience and security. In these circumstances, cloud operating costs are invariably higher.
To resolve the service issues, you have to look deeper into the nature of the service and the underlying the causes. This can be likened to an iceberg where high cloud costs sit above the water line and service technical debt sits below. Without first tackling the service issues, your options to reduce cloud costs will be limited. At the same time resolving key service issues that lead to poor stability, performance, and scalability will promote business investment opportunities.
Imagine a scenario a where an application is newly migrated to the AWS cloud following the principles of a well-architected framework. However, in operation you observe that at peak the application cannot scale-up quickly enough to support business workloads. This scenario and others like it are quite common.
The above scenario is based on a real-world example of a website that provides search and ordering capability for an online retailer based in the UK. Marketing promotions resulted in very high transient scale-up peaks placing exceptional demand on cloud services. Service stability became compromised as the cloud native mechanisms for autoscaling proved inadequate. To overcome this, tactical solutions – such as oversized cloud capacity, reverting to manual scale-up, and developing engineering measures – were implemented to assure performance instead of identifying and fixing root causes.
Despite these tactical measures, the website continued to experience service performance and scale-up problems. The communication with business teams was poor and scale-up events were not effectively anticipated.
Capacitas was able to help this customer by providing a three-point solution to tackle the challenges set-out:
A programme of cloud cost optimisation will undoubtedly allow companies to save large amounts of money. This creates obvious business advantages:
Optimising your cloud costs isn’t easy. But it’s not an impossible task either. Knowing exactly what you’re spending and why you’re spending it is just the first step in identifying opportunities for saving and implementing a long-term cost optimisation programme that will yield sustainable benefits.
To sum it up, if you’re considering cloud cost optimisation, think about:
To find out more about our approach to cloud cost optimisation, or to take a deeper dive into how to make it work for your organisation, download our latest whitepaper.