The responsibility for proper consumption of Cloud resources doesn’t fall to a single role in our organization. Rather, developers, operations personnel, as well as the managers responsible for the Cloud provider business relationship must work together to ensure the code is correct, the configurations are efficient, and the costs are transparent and carefully monitored.
There’s nothing worse than opening your water bill and finding that it’s a hundred dollars more than you expected. You scour your house and find the culprit: a leaky toilet or perhaps a dripping faucet. Hard to believe a simple drip drip drip can run up your water bill so dramatically, but those drips add up, quickly.
Replace the water with IT capability, and you have Cloud Computing. The pay-as-you-go utility model for Cloud promises dramatic cost savings, especially when unpredictable demand in a traditional, on-premise environment would require poorly utilized servers, sitting mostly idle on the off chance some spike in demand comes along. But just as with your water bill, there are many ways for your Cloud bill to go through the roof unexpectedly. Recognizing the Cloud equivalents to your problem plumbing fixtures can make the difference between saving money in the Cloud and flushing your savings down the drain.