Reducing one’s spend on Cloud isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Here at Proxima, we’re here to help you develop some ways of operating Cloud in a less costly way!
The backbone of a successful and cost-effective cloud strategy is tagging. It improves visibility, which is important in a virtual cloud environment. Due to the large amount of resources used, it’s simple to become lost and confused without labeling. A good naming strategy lowers the risk, but it necessitates the repurposing of existing resources. Because tagging is non-destructive, you may maintain the original name (for example, VM1) and merely append tags relating to the environment, usage status, and owner. This assists you in navigating the estate and determining which VMs may be switched off or deleted, as well as who to contact about them.
The visibility and traceability of resources and workloads are improved with a consistent methodology. Using logical group names, such as ‘production systems,’ for example, allows anyone with access to an environment to immediately identify what’s what. This also allows for better resource group management; if expenses start to rise, it’s easy to pinpoint the source. It’s also a good idea to include a reference to the related cost centre in tags so that any additional cloud operation expenses may be assigned to the appropriate department. Even with the best of intentions, a resource’s name may not accurately represent its intended function. It’s critical to avoid this; tagging must be handled with care. One of the most important cost management benefits of cloud computing is the avoidance of overprovisioning. It does not, however, happen automatically. The most effective approach to reduce provisioning – and hence expenses – is to rightsize instances. When moving to the cloud, however, many businesses overlook this.
According to AWS, rightsizing should be a continuous process of “at the lowest feasible cost, matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements.” It’s also the process of examining deployed instances and discovering possibilities to reduce or delete them without compromising capacity or other requirements, resulting in cheaper costs.” The key to success is combining rightsizing with autoscaling. Cloud-based infrastructures should be carefully designed to suit day-to-day demands in the most cost-effective way possible, while also having the capacity to quickly change when traffic or load spikes. As a result, rather than provisioning devices for maximum demand, you provide for minimal load, then scale up as needed to handle greater load levels. Using reserved instances to fulfill minimum load requirements can help cut cloud operation expenses significantly. Instead of accessing on-demand, you commit for a year or more and enjoy lower pricing.
Dev/Test environments are one of the first workloads to be trialed on the cloud for many organizations prior to large-scale deployment. The ability to create these stand-alone organizations as needed encourages creativity, and they play an important role in cloud-based initiatives. In principle, once a Dev/Test environment has completed its purpose, it is deleted. Remains, on the other hand, can be left behind, silently devouring resources. As a result, there are hidden expenses that accumulate over time. Setting up notifications for when specific limitations are exceeded is quite useful if you have a steady cloud cost. It can reveal payments for resources you had no idea were still in use.
