Cloud computing is favored by enterprises for its efficient scalability and flexibility to pay only for the content they use. Teams can take advantage of IT’s shift to decentralized computing to develop better products while remaining competitive and agile.
But hosting services can often be paid for, making it easy to overspend. According to industry research firm Gartner, 60% of infrastructure and operational leaders will see their cloud spending exceed their budget by 2024. If an enterprise wants to get the most out of its cloud spending, it needs to optimize the cost of cloud services to maximize its return on investment.
In this article, we’ll discuss tools and processes that can help businesses understand their cloud usage and spending. We’ll look at how cloud computing has unexpected financial costs and how companies can manage and optimize their cloud costs.
The role of the cloud in modern software development
Cloud computing supports and accelerates modern software development by providing easy-to-use, scalable deployments for everyday applications. Serverless capabilities and cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes enable developers to focus more on applications rather than infrastructure and deployment.
The deployment process is faster and saves the team some of the overhead of adding new features and fixing bugs. Serverless functionality and Kubernetes build on cloud native technology, making it easier to deploy and scale applications and apis. When an enterprise creates a serverless function or deployment API, it doesn’t have to worry about where it’s hosted or how it’s extended; the cloud provider takes care of it.
However, these infinitely scalable technologies can be overwhelming for developers. There is a learning curve to become adept at identifying cloud resources that are appropriate to meet the needs of the enterprise. As a result, most companies don’t fully understand how to optimize their cloud usage or where to focus.
2. Costs associated with large-scale cloud computing
Doing business in the cloud requires thorough management and a solid knowledge of the inner workings of the cloud. The high cost of cloud computing stems from the use of infrastructure, including virtual machines (VMS), Kubernetes clusters, virtual networks, public IP, and DNS entries.
The core principle of cloud computing is that companies should only pay for the resources they use, like renting computing power or using utilities such as electricity. This pay-as-you-go model should allow companies to adjust resources instantly when demand is unpredictable, without making large investments in local infrastructure. For example, an enterprise should be able to scale horizontally by adding more servers when it encounters a burst of load. Or, if your enterprise’s business applications have low traffic during the holidays and need to reduce costs, you can scale back the infrastructure.
While most cloud providers offer this configuration, many file storage providers (as opposed to providers of object storage or block storage solutions) use a model in which the enterprise must pay up front for the space it thinks it needs. Storing large amounts of data in the cloud this way can become very expensive, although it is usually better than setting up local storage units.
By comparing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage, you can get some background information about the current status of Cloud Storage products. These providers provide storage for unstructured object files. The simplicity of object storage technology allows cloud providers to allocate resources more efficiently, and they pass on these benefits to users by charging per GIGAByte rather than forcing them to predict workloads and configure capacity they may never use.
Even so, cloud infrastructure can still quietly incur costs through fees hidden in data transmission and data storage. Most cloud providers allow customers to transfer data to their network for free (the entry point), but charge them to send it out (the exit point). AWS, for example, offers free data transfer within its network but charges 12 cents per gigabyte for data transfer outside its network.
Developers typically use databases such as MongoDB or Postgres to store structured data. Many enterprises use database as a Service (DBaaS) to launch fully managed databases in the cloud, bypassing the traditional approach of setting up VMS and manually installing security patches. But there are costs to this approach, and as the data footprint grows, they can quickly exceed a company’s budget.
3. The importance of cloud cost management
Many software delivery teams struggle to get a full picture of their enterprise’s cloud usage, costs can add up quickly, and before they know it, they’re paying thousands of dollars for a service they don’t need or may be configuring differently.
As a result, cloud cost management has become a critical part of operating a business in the cloud. To see the full picture, teams sometimes need to look at the billing console or charge for separate accounts for each service. This approach can be challenging if they have only a few accounts. If they use dozens or hundreds of services, it’s almost impossible.
Because creating new resources in the cloud is just a few clicks away, teams can easily configure resources they don’t need. If they forget to close the resource they created, they will be charged for unused capacity.
Most cloud services charge on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, such bills can be misleading because they never arrive immediately. The team might accidentally start 10,000 virtual machines instead of the 10 they wanted. They may set loose policies, and then their software will cope with continuous traffic spikes by offering a lot of public cloud resources. In these cases, companies will expect to know exactly how resources are being used before the big bills arrive at the end of the month.
The cloud is not a minefield for financial ruin, but the power it offers requires careful approach. Unfortunately, this can also be a costly mistake, as cloud computing gives businesses more ways to spend their money than ever before, making cloud cost management critical for businesses of all sizes.
4. How to optimize cloud cost in the enterprise
Businesses often waste money on cloud costs because they don’t understand how much the team is spending. The relevant teams in the enterprise may have a general awareness, but not a clear understanding, and some team members may not know how their choices affect operating costs.
So, what can enterprise teams do?
1) Check the billing dashboard regularly
It is best to implement a cloud cost optimization strategy during the planning phase. This approach can help companies avoid unexpected costs.
Unexpectedly high costs can catch even the most experienced cloud engineers off guard, so it’s best to check enterprise usage against historical cloud consumption patterns.
Consumption-based billing solutions enable businesses to visualize their patterns and their associated costs over time. This helps enterprises identify which applications and services are consuming the most resources and reduce them when they fail to provide business value.
Most major cloud providers provide a dashboard that summarizes an enterprise’s cloud service spending at a high level. AWS has cost manager, GCP provides cloud billing reporting, and Azure provides cost management and billing. Some manual setup and monitoring is required to take full advantage of these tools, so it’s best to familiarize yourself with them early on in your cloud journey to ensure your business gets accurate and actionable spending insights.
2) Make sure the team is accountable for its costs
Understanding how each team member or department works with others in the enterprise helps hold the team accountable for its cloud costs.
One of the best ways to encourage efficient use of the cloud is to provide the team with some background information. Help them understand what resources are being used and how. This visibility gives teams more incentive to use the cloud efficiently. Otherwise, they can’t make sure they don’t use more than a reasonable amount.
Suppose an enterprise manages five teams, all deployed on a Kubernetes cluster. At first, it seemed like a good idea. When an enterprise has only a few containers, it is simple to set up and works well initially. If more resources are needed, the provider is happy to sell some to the enterprise, and everyone seems happy.
But no one has the incentive to use cloud resources wisely. If every team is deployed to the same cluster without using tags, tags, or some other way to track who is using what resources, no one has a clear idea how their usage compares to other teams.
Moreover, if everyone is deployed to the same cluster, it will be difficult for an enterprise to find room for new projects without cutting existing ones. By clearly tracking resource usage for specific teams and deployments, organizations can better manage overall expenditures.
3) Use third-party solutions
Third-party cloud cost management platforms can help enterprises get more revenue from cloud investments. These platforms provide single-screen views across infrastructures, including multi-cloud deployments, and provide or integrate with tools for finer control of resource allocation. They also track costs in real time and alert when infrastructure use exceeds agreed limits.
Some commonly used cloud cost management solutions include Apptio Cloudability, Flexera, CloudHealth by VMware, CloudCheckr, Densify, and Virtana. Many of these platforms also provide AI-enabled tools for adjusting or flagging overallocated cloud resources based on historical usage trends in the enterprise, helping the enterprise identify and eliminate unnecessary expenditures.
Consistent deployment strategies can also help companies control cloud costs. By automating deployment and infrastructure configuration in the CI/CD pipeline, enterprises can avoid costly errors when developers manually configure resources. Many continuous integration platforms have integration capabilities with infrastructure-as-code tools, such as Terraform and Pulumi, which enterprises can use to specify the exact resources to initiate deployment and set resource usage limits through cost containment policies.
5) conclusion
With the amount of money companies are investing in the cloud ($396 billion as of 2021), getting cloud cost optimization strategies right is becoming increasingly important. Cloud computing costs can climb in a number of ways over time, but by proactively managing their investments, companies can avoid costly surprises in the future and can focus on delivering the features that matter most to their users.
Making: github.com/yunionio/cl…
Official website: www.yunion.cn/