14 May 2019

How to reduce your cloud costs

If you don’t manage your cloud spend, the cloud will manage you

Cloud costs are dynamic. They’re based on demand, making them elastic and hard to manage – especially against a budget. On an individual basis, costs can be negligible, but even in a small – but busy – cloud environment the charges will mount up very quickly. So how do you estimate your cloud costs and manage them effectively? How do you choose which cloud is best for you? It’s hard to compare the costs of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud when they’re ever-changing according to need. And how do you monitor, collate compare and contrast multi-cloud environments?

Analysing your cloud costs

Many turn to tools to manage their costs. But a tool is only useful if it’s used skilfully. Automation is one of the myriad of tools available for managing the cloud; when it works, it’s wonderful. However, when it doesn’t, it can be disastrous… It’s important to recognise that a tool won’t provide cloud cost optimisation – it will only assist you to do so.

However, it is possible to obtain real-time figures and to be alert to any anomalies to expected spend. When monitoring cloud spend, you should:

have auto actual vs budget analytics and alerts in place
have a mechanism to verify the spending is justified to multiple audiences
be able to charge back to your desired level of granularity
be able to run estimation calculations for different clouds, even before deployment.

We can optimise your cloud costs

Our job is to deliver programs to help you use tools as effectively as possible.

One simple yet effective tip is in deleting a compute asset. Typically, you’ll be asked whether you want to delete the attached storage – a question which is easy to miss. However, if you don’t delete the storage, the volume will remain unattached – and you will be charged for it. This is especially significant when a compute asset has multiple volumes, as they will all need deleting. The same applies with network assets: elastic IPs will remain and you will be charged. And to further compound the issue, this practice will vary across different cloud providers.

Recently, we saved a client two enormous costs. Firstly, we uncovered a five-figure monthly overspend on unused volumes due to the incorrect decommissioning of compute platforms. Secondly, we prevented the client procuring more unnecessary cloud management tools – a saving of another six-figure sum. That’s a significant reduction for anybody’s cloud costs. And we can do it for you.