Cloud Cost Optimization: 9 Best Practices to Reduce Cloud Cost for Your Organization
As we progress towards a self-sustaining work environment where local redundancy is not permitted (by enhanced security protocol), cloud-based systems for resource management become essential for every business.
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Cost optimization allows businesses to become more cost-efficient, environmentally friendly, and collaborative.
While cloud computing is the next big step for many businesses, most enterprises have failed to experience its full potential.
Cloud optimization is about reducing inefficient resource management to cut production costs while positively impacting performance. It allows one to leverage the benefits of cloud technology without increasing cost.
9 Tips on How you can Reduce Cloud Cost
1. Selecting the Right Instance
AWS offers over 300 types of instances, but selecting the one that’s right for your business can be overwhelming even for experienced application managers and developers.
The right instances and their optimal families must be elected during initialization. Developers must also pay attention to idle compute resources to eliminate wasteful spending. One must right-size the EC2 infrastructure and continuously monitor the compute resource utilization and reduce cost.
2. Eliminate Redundant and Unattached Resources
Temporary servers are often used by developers and administrators to perform the function at hand. This practice works well at the moment but can increase the cloud cost when the instances are not properly terminated.
Now, whether or not you are using these resources, they will be reflected in your AWS bills. It is your responsibility to remove redundant and unnecessary resources to reduce cloud costs.
3. The Right Scheduling of Resources
For businesses that run five days a week scheduling resources is a great trick. By configuring schedules, you can control the time window within which your resources will be active. Since the resources will not run continuously, cloud costs should decrease.
4. Opt For Multi-Cloud
This strategy may not suit everyone, especially if you enjoy single cloud vendor discounts but it will definitely decrease the cloud cost. By operating multi-clouds instead of a single one, you can certainly avoid vendor lock-in. By doing so, you would be able to increase both uptime and availability.
5. Track Cost Anomalies
Seasonal demands and unexpected factors can contribute to variations in cloud usage. While some deviation is acceptable, one must stay aware of unexpected spikes or spends that are out-of-budget. Many users fail to use this data on time and end up paying heavy costs later.
Tracking cost anomalies is important if anomalies are small, but happen often, this could be a matter of concern as well.
6. Select the Ideal Storage Type
Selecting the right storage type can reduce the cloud cost dramatically. Rapid scalability has made S3 the ideal choice for developers who aren’t initially certain how much storage their project will require in the future.
S3’s Intelligent Tiering feature can help companies adapt to usage patterns and automatically reallocate files to fit performance needs and legal requirements for data archival in the same breath.
7. Use Reserved Instances and Savings Plans to Purchase Instances
Many aspects of a business may have typical use patterns such as quarterly reports, annual sales (for eCommerce), and yearly product launches. These routine needs are an ideal use case for Reserve Instances rather than On Demand. Proper planning with Reserve Instances can reduce costs by up to 70% for a long-running workload.
Planning can be difficult, but refined and considered purchase strategies can pay dividends. Large enterprises should consider the instance-by-instance method.
8. Invest on Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) or AWS Reserved Instances (RIs)
If you are one of the enterprises that have identified the importance, we are sure that you must be planning to use it for a longer course. By investing in Reserved Instances, you would be able to enjoy larger discounts. As upfront payments and commitment in terms of time are required, this option is suitable for serious cloud users. The discounts can go as high as 75%.
RIs offer you two options, you can either purchase them for one year or you can opt for their three-year plan. Different plans come with different discounts.
9. Remove Unused EBS Snapshots from Cloud
With AWS, one can manually or automatically capture EBS volume snapshots. These snapshots are useful and can be stored on S3. EBS snapshots are primarily used for disaster recovery.
Snapshots also help fulfill legal requirements to maintain records in case of a legal inquiry, but keeping them too long or capturing them too often can result in unnecessary cloud costs in S3 storage.
As more businesses move their data from on-site storage and hardware to the cloud, managing costs can require a more dynamic and flexible approach. The financial success of your next project could depend on effective cloud cost optimization and planning.
VLink offers the experience and expertise you need to help manage cloud infrastructure for your business using proven methods to reduce cost, increase productivity, and stay compliant with legal and regulatory requirements. Give us a call today to learn what we can do for you and your business!
