Amazing Tips For Cloud Cost Optimization
Tags: cloud, cloudskills, cloudoptimization
Published: 2020-11-21 07:46:35

#What Is Cloud Cost Optimization?
Cloud cost optimization is a process of reducing overall cloud spend by identifying mismanaged resources, reserving capacity for higher discounts, eliminating waste and right sizing computing services to scale. Cloud offers organizations unlimited scalability and lower IT costs by just charging for the resources you use. But AWS and Microsoft Azure pricing is that cloud customers are charged for the resources they order, whether they use it or not. Let us see some cloud cost optimization tips.

#Cloud Cost Optimization Tips-
**1. Find Unused Resources-**
Simplest way to reduce cloud cost is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for. An administrator or developer might use a temporary server to perform a function and forget to turn it off when the job is done. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it regularly will help you to reduce the cloud cost.  If necessary, you can deploy automated cloud management tools which are helpful to provide analytics needed to optimize the cloud cost and cut it regularly.

**2. Identify Idle instances-**
This one is also an important cloud optimizing strategy which reduces costs of idle resources. Idle computing instance might have CPU utilization level of 1 to 5%. When an enterprise is charged for 100% of that computing instance, it is a huge waste. It is necessary to identify such instances and consolidate computing jobs onto fewer instances. In the data centers, administrators often wanted to operate at minimum use so that they would have headroom for traffic rise. Adding new resources in a data center is expensive, inefficient and difficult. Rather, cloud offers autoscaling, load balancing and on-demand capabilities that allow you to improve your computing power at any time.

**3. Right Size Computing Services-**
It is a process of analyzing computing services and modifying it to the efficient size. Generally, it is difficult to correctly size instances when cloud administrators has more than 1 million possible combinations to select. Besides, there are choices for servers optimized for database, memory, computing, graphics, storage capacity, throughput and so on. Right sizing not only reduces the cloud costs but also helps with cloud optimization, that means achieving high performance from resources for which you are paying for.  

**4. Use Headmaps-**
For cloud cost optimization, headmaps are important. It is a visual tool that shows ups and downs in computing demand. This data is important in establishing start and stop times to reduce costs. Headmaps can indicate whether development servers can be safely shut down on weekends. This can be done manually but the good option is to use automation to schedule instances to start and stop, optimizing costs.

**5. Use Alerts-**
There are some third-party cloud management platforms that provide monitoring of cloud usage. Besides, many service providers offer features like alert that notifies you when specific events occur and allows you to take required actions for cost reduction. You can set alerts when the monthly spending limit is crossed or when the cloud storage cost reaches a specific point. Also you can set alerts to notify about non-production instances or storage volumes after certain days. Also you can use auto-scaling mechanisms to know whether you have chosen the right plan or need to change.

**6. Consider Right Applications For Cloud-**
When you are thinking about cloud cost cutting, it will be better to scrutinize the apps before initiating its migration to the cloud. It is true that, some apps cost more on cloud as compared to when they work on-premise and some of the apps may not function at its optimum while on the cloud. Unknowingly, numerous enterprises will in general start migration of some wrong applications to the cloud which increases costs and stalled performance. So review the code and design of app and discover its cloud resource utilization to make an informed decision on cloud migration.

**7. Exploit Spot Instances-**
Spot instances and RIs are two different things but it can help you to save on AWS spend or Azure spend. Spot instances are available for auction and if the cost is correct, can be purchased for instant use. But chances of buying Spot instances can go away rapidly. Means they are good for computing instances like jobs that can be terminated quickly. Such kind of jobs are common in large enterprises, thus Spot instances are important for all cloud cost optimization strategies.

**8. Select Discounted Options If Possible –**
To reduce the cloud cost, reserved instances are the best way. Though most of the service providers offer RIs, it works just if you have clear vision on your monthly cloud usage. This lets you save 75% cost of on-demand instance pricing. If your organization has stable patterns of usage, you can buy reserved instances that helps you to save more and better ROI. Also, you can offer for unused instances that are alluded to as spot instances. In general, service providers sell spot instances at high discount rates. Generally it is good for short-term projects.

**9. Compare Multi-Cloud Vs Single Cloud-**
Some enterprises go through multi-cloud solutions to avoid vendor lock-in. This is a legitimate technique for expanding uptime and accessibility, these organizations may risk losing potential volume discounts by a single cloud vendor. For instance, if a particular company spends $500,000 ON AWS + $300,000 an Azure + $200,000 on Google cloud platform, they could miss reaching the $1 million tier with one vendor. Cost of that $1 million tier may be substantial discounts on overall cloud spend and preferred status with specific vendor. Also cost saving ability with multi-cloud strategy can be exceeded by the administrative issues of switching between platforms, paying for network traffic between clouds and training staff on various clouds.