Any organization looking to get the most out of the cloud has to invest in cloud cost optimization. After all, running your organization’s workloads in the cloud is relatively easy. But cost-effectively running these workloads is a whole different ball game.
These timely cost optimization strategies will help you address your organization’s challenges while trying to keep cloud bills under control.
How to Optimize Cloud Costs
Using Third-Party Cloud Monitoring Tools
Cloud vendors won’t help your organization control cloud costs. However, some third-party providers offer cloud cost monitoring tools. These tools keep tabs on your cloud workloads and identify unused resources in a bid to control cloud costs.
Some tools, such as CloudBolt, can give you recommendations about how to right-size workloads. For example, you can easily identify less expensive virtual server instances to run your workloads. These tools thus present a worthwhile investment for the cost-conscious organization.
Using Pay-Per-Use
Some cloud providers require organizations to pay for workloads regularly, even when they’re not using them. For example, you may pay a monthly fee per unit of storage, even when you only access data a few times a year.
On the other hand, some cloud service providers require you to pay when the workload is fully active. Serverless functions are a good example.
In a serverless setup, organizations upload code to the cloud, and the cloud provider executes the code on demand. You only pay for the time the code is running. This way, your organization can have the code constantly available without having to pay for idle time.
You must figure out which model works best for your organization. To do this, you need to weigh various factors that affect the total costs of running different services. Pay-per-use often works best for most workloads.
Using Tiered Storage
Cloud providers often have different tiers of storage available to customers. Providers usually price these tiers based on the speed of access your organization requires. Does your organization have data that needs to stay in the cloud that you won’t need to access frequently? It’s logical to use a lower cost tier for this type of data. This decision may affect performance, but you reduce your overall cloud bill considerably.
Smart Use of Cloud Regions
Cloud providers often have a couple of regions available to customers for hosting their workloads. The price for each region is different for different services. It’s tempting to run workloads in the region closest to you as it usually guarantees better performance.
In some cases, organizations want to replicate their workloads across multiple regions to maximize availability. Both of these approaches are valid. But they’re not strictly necessary.
Do you have workloads that are not time-critical, and you can afford to wait a few seconds longer to receive or access data? You might want to host workloads in a cloud region located farther away from you. This can be cheaper compared with using a server in the closest region.
Also, you can save money by avoiding the replication of workloads across multiple regions. This is particularly true if the risk of having a workload becomes unavailable and won’t significantly affect your business.
Today, downtimes are rare with major cloud providers. Nonetheless, they can happen. Determine which workloads and applications can tolerate this type of downtime and move them to cheaper cloud regions.
