{"id":39123,"date":"2019-06-13T09:11:53","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T09:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/news\/2019\/jun\/13\/six-pillars-cloud-cost-optimisation-and-how-get-them-work-you\/"},"modified":"2019-06-13T09:11:53","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T09:11:53","slug":"the-six-pillars-of-cloud-cost-optimisation-and-how-to-get-them-to-work-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/the-six-pillars-of-cloud-cost-optimisation-and-how-to-get-them-to-work-for-you\/","title":{"rendered":"The six pillars of cloud cost optimisation \u2013 and how to get them to work for you"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Let me start by painting the picture: You’re the CFO, or manager of a department, group, or team, and you’re ultimately responsible for any and all financial costs incurred by your team\/group\/department. Or maybe you’re in IT and you’ve been told to keep a handle on the costs generated by application use and code development resources. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Your company has moved some or all of your projects and apps to the public cloud, and since things seem to be running pretty smoothly from a production standpoint, most of the company is feeling pretty good about the transition.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Except you.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The promise of moving to the cloud to cut costs hasn’t matriculated and attempting to figure out the monthly bill from your cloud provider has you shaking your head.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From reserved instances and on-demand costs, to the “unblended” and “blended” rates, attempting to even make sense of the bill has you no closer to understanding where you can optimise your spend.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It’s not even just the pricing structure that requires an entire department of accountants to make sense of, the breakdown of the services themselves is just as mind boggling. In fact, there are at least 500,000 SKUs and price combinations in AWS alone! In addition, your team likely has no limitation on who can spin up any specific resource at any time, intrinsically compounding the problem—especially when staff leave them running, the proverbial meter racking up the $$ in the background.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Addressing this complex and ever-moving problem is not, in fact, a simple matter, and requires a comprehensive and intimate approach that starts with understanding the variety of opportunities available for cost and performance optimisation. This where our six pillars of cloud optimisation come in.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Reserved instances (RIs)<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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AWS Reserved Instances, Azure Reserved VM Instances, and Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts take the ephemeral out of cloud resources, allowing you to estimate up front what you’re going to use. This also entitles you to steep discounts for pre-planning, which ends up as a great financial incentive.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Most cloud cost optimisations, erroneously, begin and end here—providing you and your organisation with a less than optimal solution. Resources to estimate RI purchases are available through cloud providers directly and through third party optimisation tools. For example, CloudHealth by VMware provides a clear picture into where to purchase RI’s based on your current cloud use over a number of months and will help you manage your RI lifecycle over time.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Two of the major factors to consider here are Risk Tolerance<\/em> and Centralised RI Management<\/em> portfolios.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n