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October 8, 2019 - by Ken Knox
For most organizations today, the advantages of cloud computing are compelling: improved flexibility, better responsiveness, extreme scalability, among others. Given the many ways in which businesses can benefit from the cloud, the pace of cloud adoption is relentless.
But here’s the catch: in a bid to embrace all things cloud, many organizations end up allocating massive budgets – which often go unmonitored. The end result? Far higher operational expenditures that often comes as a (rude) shock! More so because of all the hullabaloo about the cloud being “economical”.
Cloud vendors have made it extremely easy for organizations and even individual users to spin up a cloud server in minutes; it is this ease and speed of creating servers and workloads in the cloud that leads to a loss of control and increased costs.
Research by Gartner indicates that organizations without a plan for cloud cost optimization might be overspending by 70% or more. Therefore, what organizations need is a cloud budget checklist so they can be in control of their spend, and ensure it doesn’t skyrocket. A cloud budget checklist enables you to:
A cloud budget checklist is a great way to get the visibility you need into cloud spend while providing you with the opportunity to envision how it fits into your organization’s budget. With a checklist in place, you can be far more efficient and achieve a lot more with cloud.
Here’s a list of questions your checklist must have so you can keep cloud costs under control:
The first thing you should be able to do with your cloud budget checklist is to identify (and terminate). Since they are components running in your cloud that are no longer used (or required) but are still being paid for, they are known to guzzle your cloud budget – without serving any purpose. Make sure you are constantly terminating zombie assets and moving object data to lower cloud cost tiers for better cost optimization.
Unattached and orphaned volumes, aging snapshots, and disassociated elastic IP addresses are also known to consume a lot of your cloud budget – without really driving any value. Therefore, to optimize cloud spend, it is advisable you tick off this item off your cloud budget checklist, and save up massively on cloud spend.
Most cloud instances are provided with a fair amount of storage and performance cushion to make sure the applications running on them work properly. However, many instances might be sitting on a lot more resources than needed.
Monitoring and analyzing your current workload, gaining insight into performance and usage patterns, and accordingly right-sizing your instances is vital to meet your capacity needs at the lowest cost. Make sure to observe performance over a one-month period across metrics such as vCPU utilization, memory utilization, and network utilization, and determine how to right-size instances – without affecting performance.
In comparison to on-demand instances, reserved instances and nodes offer significant discounts, along with the flexibility to change families, OS types, and tenancies. Since they have a predefined capacity reserved for themselves, they allow you to seamlessly launch the number of instances you have reserved, when you need them – with confidence and without any issue. And since capacity reservation is automatically utilized by running instances matching these attributes, you can save substantial costs.
Public cloud spending is at an all-time high, expected to reach $206.2 billion by the end of 2019. So is cloud overspend – an estimated total of $14.1 billion has been predicted to be wasted in cloud overspend in 2019 alone. With idle and oversized resources being the primary factors for massive cloud bills, it’s time you took measures to optimize cloud spend.
A cloud budget checklist is a great way to avoid falling victim to cloud overspend. It allows you to delete unattached volumes and aging snapshots, identify and terminate zombie assets, stop and start instances on a schedule, right-size them and purchase reserves instances and nodes, so you can always be in control!
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