Optimizing costs is one of the constant concerns of many companies. Especially in these times. For this reason, it is common to review from time to time, generally every six months or once a year, the total costs of the different departments, and see how they can be adjusted so as not to waste a single euro. For example, in the cloud. Adjust cloud investment is one of the constant warnings IT departments receive.
There’s no doubt that having VMs with the right dimensions saves money, but when it comes to keeping costs down in the cloud, there are many steps that can be taken to achieve this. And not only review what is spent in the cloud controlling workloads one by one. Neither taking advantage of offers and discounts that may appear for individual virtual machines. There are several measures that, if applied systematically, help control and reduce costs even more than traditional measures alone.
As we have mentioned, the most common measure to reduce costs in the cloud is monitor its dimensioning. That is, choose the best hosting configuration based on the requirements of each workload. The goal of this measure is to avoid paying for resources that your workloads don’t need.
You can also take advantage of discounts offered by cloud providers for some of their services. Of course, in these cases, the users who hire them have to accept in return. For example, money can be saved by taking advantage of specific cloud storage class offerings from leading cloud providers such as AWS. Of course, in many of these cases, cloud storage classes have a less agile response than other more expensive options.
In addition, you can also control expenses monitoring workloads. By keeping an eye on what’s running in the cloud, you can discover workloads or resources that are running, but shouldn’t be. This way you can eliminate them, with the consequent disappearance of the expense that they were causing.
In this way, by minimizing waste and improving cost effectiveness, you can save in the cloud for specific workloads. But as we’ve mentioned, these traditional savings strategies offer limited value. Above all, because they only take advantage of specific workloads, instead of offering you savings that you can apply to the entire cloud you use. Or at least, to all workloads of a particular type. That is why it is advisable to also use other strategies, as we have mentioned.
The first one is the taking an approach multicloud. With this type of architecture you can lower your overall cloud investment. It allows you to take advantage of cloud services at a lower cost than if you brought everything to a single cloud. This way, you can take advantage of each provider’s best prices for workloads and data storage.
One cloud provider may cost less than others to host virtual machines, and another may offer object storage at a lower price. A multicloud architecture strategy allows you to take advantage of all of them, one for each type of element that you have to store or run in the cloud. In this way, you save money.
Also, if your company is of a certain size, let alone if it is a large company or a multinational, you can save a lot of money. negotiating an enterprise agreement with your cloud provider(s). Company agreements allow a company of a certain importance, or those that consume a large amount of cloud resources, to have more than notable discounts. Without a doubt, a good way to lower the bill.
But not only large companies or those with a high volume of cloud resource consumption can access better prices. Smaller ones can also do it. However, they can access better prices through a different system: through cloud credits for startups. If your company is small or is taking its first steps, you can ask the cloud providers that most convince you if they have this type of offer.
With cloud credits you can get free access, or with a significant discount, to cloud services. They are designed to offer a boost to companies that are taking their first steps, or that are going to access the cloud for the first time. Of course, you have to take into account that they will only be valid for a certain period of time. Even so, you always have to ask your provider if these deadlines could be extended.
As you will see, these measures to control cloud spending affect the use of the cloud by your entire company. And they have another advantage: putting them into operation is quite simple. They just require a bit of advance planning, and of course negotiating prices and searching for large-scale deals. Once providers and plans have been chosen, it is only necessary to deal with the storage and execution of tasks.
Other more traditional practices, such as resizing each virtual machine instance, require a lot more work, and they also require ongoing work. Therefore, in many cases, they do not compensate as much in relation to the money that you can save like this. Plus, you don’t need a lot of technical skills to get the savings. Basically, it is enough to ask about offers and plans, request company agreements or find out if a provider has cloud credits for startups.
Of course, it is necessary that you take measures more related to workload managementand the remove the ones you don’t need, to complete the savings. For example, check if you have redundant or idle resources in the cloud. And of course, always have control of what is in the cloud, and where it is.
