Many things are usually easy when you first start out. For example, purchasing a new home is exciting and straightforward at first, but over time, maintenance issues arise, insurance costs and property taxes increase, and neighborhood dynamics change. Suddenly that dream home starts keeping you up at night. It is the same with the cloud.
Beyond the Cloud’s Silver Lining
Cloud adoption is easy at the beginning too. Cloud providers typically offer straightforward onboarding processes for small-scale migrations using an easy-to-use GUI interface. The pay-as-you-go model seems like a great deal compared to the cost of depreciating datacenter assets, forklift upgrades and software maintenance. Cloud offers a perfect alternative to fixed depreciating assets, especially when organizations have a need for increased workloads based on seasonal business trends. However, the more services and applications you migrate to the cloud, it becomes increasingly important to manage these assets in a standardized and streamlined manner.
- Cloud costs can become increasingly difficult to manage as more services across multiple clouds are expanded, given that each cloud provider has a different pricing model, as well as costs can escalate rapidly due to factors like data transfer, storage, and unexpected usage spikes.
- With increased cloud adoption, there is a tendency to overlook wasted resources. Once resources are provisioned manually, their continuous existence accrues on the monthly bill; so increased discipline is needed to keep the resource utilization to only what is needed.
- Underutilization of resources is one of the biggest challenges in the Cloud. There is a tendency to overprovision the sizing of resources because they are available, and this causes wasteful spending for organizations.
In the beginning, cloud optimization may seem like a Day 2 exercise; however, it can quickly become an imperative activity if budgets are exceeded due to unintentional wastage of resources. The cloud is no different than on prem in the fact that it requires planning, continuous monitoring, and proactive management to ensure that everything runs to meet business objectives. It is something you cannot afford to put off.
Why aren’t Companies Achieving Cost Optimization?
If the cloud was supposed to be simpler than on-prem, then why does cloud optimization seem elusive to some organizations? A primary reason is the pace at which cloud transformation has taken place; the priority has often been “move to the cloud first and worry about optimization later”. It is an easy trap to get into.
At Keyva, we’ve seen companies spend substantial amounts on cloud migrations, sometimes up to a million dollars per month. Imagine if you could save just 2% of that expenditure. That translates into real savings that could be reinvested in other business initiatives.
Another reason why optimization isn’t achieved for a while is that like anything, the cloud has a learning curve, and some of those lessons can prove quite costly. Consulting with third-party experts who understand common pitfalls and mistakes can help you bypass the trial-and-error phase. These experts can guide you through the optimization process, ensuring you avoid the typical gotchas and costly errors and achieve cost efficiency and ROI sooner.
Achieving Operational Hygiene
We often hear about security hygiene. At Keyva, we also emphasize operational hygiene. That topic includes a lot of things, and one of the big ones is right-sizing. Overprovisioning is the #1 culprit of cloud overspending and it’s surprisingly easy to do. When choosing options in the cloud menu, the largest ones may be chosen for you by default, or you may be driven by normal human tendency to select a larger option. An organization should have guardrails to ensure a structured process for choosing the right amount and right-sized resource bundles. This can be done in several ways – by establishing a committee that must approve larger or expensive options to prevent unnecessary expenditures, or by using infrastructure as code methodologies.
By incorporating chargeback and showback features which enhance cost visibility and accountability, it can be helpful to see the breakdown for features and resources used by various teams within the organization. Here’s how they work:
- Showback provides detailed reports on cloud resource usage and associated costs without directly billing departments. It can serve as an educational tool to enhance cost awareness and help teams understand their cloud spending patterns and identify areas for cost optimization.
- Chargeback involves directly billing departments or teams for their cloud resource usage to make them transparent. Tying costs to actual usage prevents wasteful spending and aligns cloud costs with departmental budgets. This approach promotes financial accountability and encourages teams to optimize their resource allocation.
Some Steps are Easy
Cloud optimization doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as turning off resources after use. Just as you learned to turn off lights when leaving a room to save on the electric bill, you should deprovision resources when they’re not needed. The sooner guardrails are set up to manage cloud costs, the better it is for adoption. While provisioning cloud native VMs or services in response to demand spikes is typically prioritized, turning them off after intended use or reducing the size and scale of utilized clusters should receive equal attention. All of this can be automated using infrastructure as code pipelines as well.
License bundling is another simple but effective strategy for optimizing cloud costs as it helps streamline expenses, enhances flexibility and reduces administrative overhead. Much like cloud computing, where shared resources maximize efficiency, bundled licensing prevents service redundancies and minimizes underutilized cloud instances. By consolidating licenses, organizations ensure they are only paying for what they actually need, leading to greater cost efficiency and a more optimized cloud environment.
The 15-point Approach
At Keyva, we’ve developed a comprehensive 15-point strategy to achieve cloud optimization. When working with clients, we utilize monitoring to analyze key metrics such as average utilization, volume requests, and peak time utilization. This helps determine the optimal sourcing of resources.
Monitoring is only valuable if it leads to actionable insights. At Keyva, we work with all the major cloud vendors, and use Well Architected Framework (WAF) model as a guide to achieving efficiency in systems and capacity. Our certified staff has worked with all major hyperscalers and cloud providers, and implemented WAF framework for multiple clients across various industry verticals. Cloud optimization is about finding real savings that can show an ROI quickly. Find out more about our 15-point strategy by contacting us today.
 | Anuj Tuli, Chief Technology Officer Anuj specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. He has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments, and Migration projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors. He leads the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. During his career, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation, and DevOps domains. With certifications in AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, Anuj offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies. Like what you read? Follow Anuj on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujtuli/ |