When we talk about the cloud, we address aspects related to architectures, services, and migration strategies. Within all this, it is essential to have a clear cost strategy that leads to its optimization in a natural way.
Unlike an on-premise scheme, cloud services have one of their pricing models on demand. In other words, you pay only for what is used in each and every one of the services.
Whereas in an on-premise infrastructure, everything has to be provisioned from the start, paying upfront or at a fixed cost. On-premise infrastructure is fixed by nature, which does not allow for the implementation of a cost strategy that facilitates its optimization.
This is because you buy a complete server with specific capabilities that will remain for its entire useful life, whether it is current or not. For that reason, over time, on-premise infrastructure becomes obsolete.
Pillars for a Cloud Strategy
A cloud strategy must be based on the principles of control, visibility, and continuity. That is, we must understand that nothing is definitive other than change.
In that sense, we have in our hands the power to add, subtract, assemble and disassemble an architecture as the business needs. Hence, immense possibilities arise to innovate, support customer requests and manage data repositories with a large amount of information.
Considerations for a Cloud Cost Strategy
Being on demand, if the aforementioned principles are not followed, budgets can overflow without knowing how to control them or even overpay due to lack of adequate infrastructure.
That’s why, based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, we give you five tips to improve your cloud cost strategy:
1. Separate and label
In AWS, tagging, that is, tagging resources to designate an owner, area, project or user, will allow you to identify how much is spent for that area, owner or project. So, start tagging your assets as soon as possible.
Separating your workloads or environments by AWS accounts allows you to further refine your cost strategy. For example, in development environments, tests, countries, etc. One of the security principles is the separation of accounts so as not to compromise information or data, while at the same time serving to determine costs.
2. Understand the performance of storage, database, and instance services
To establish your cost strategy that allows you to optimize them, there is nothing like knowing if the resources are oversized or unused. Performance should be monitored, since, if there is excess, it is best to move the applications to a smaller machine and thus reduce the cost. If they are unusable, we should not leave them there; in the AWS Cloud, a machine can be provisioned in a matter of hours.
In terms of storage, a very common mistake is to think that in the cloud it works the same as on an on-premise server. Volumes attached to the machines are provisioned considering a number of GB or terabytes to store documents, files, etc., which can impact costs since the price is permanent as long as a certain amount of gigabytes or terabytes is provisioned. Therefore, sizing what we need is relevant to define your cost strategy.
In case of having files, documents or backups, these must be located in the specialized storage service that is S3, the latter being incredibly economical and managed. This can be reviewed on a monthly or bi-monthly basis as part of your cost strategy, as what you have today is probably not what you need tomorrow.
3. Access control under the least privilege scheme
Although it may seem like a security recommendation, it is also a security strategy. In case of not having a Cloud Government and free access is given to work teams, for example, development, it is very common for them to configure services freely without considering the budget and then forget to turn them off.
This can lead to an increase in consumption without knowing why or for what purpose the resource was raised by the people who manage the infrastructure.
4. Innovative architectures
Let’s start thinking about autoscaling and microservices. Let’s leave behind the fact of having a huge machine or several instances on all the time as if it were an on-premise scheme.
In AWS, there is autoscaling, where machines are provisioned vertically as requests grow. This, in addition to ensuring that all requests can be received and met, allows scaling to only be carried out by hours, minutes and seconds. Once the requests decrease, the number of basic servers is returned.
On the serverless side, having applications that do not require machine provisioning is key as part of your cost strategy, because it can produce savings of up to 60%, since these services have one of the lowest prices in the cloud. To get to this point, ongoing training is necessary, as well as establishing a cloud path.
5. Have a short-, medium- and long-term strategy
With the help of a partner, a strategic plan is developed in the cloud, through which it begins gradually, knowing in detail the status of the applications, bases and licensing.
A progressive, step-by-step path is defined, as well as what is required for seasons, days, special events, etc. And on top of this, resources are turned on and off, or they are monitored to control their consumption as part of the cost strategy.
Let’s remember that the *Well Architected Review* dedicates an entire pillar to a cost strategy to achieve its optimization, since both AWS and Itera seek to make you pay less and less. In this way, with the same budget, you drive continuous innovation and achieve an impact differentiator for your business.
See you in the cloud!
There are other strategies for cost optimization, as it is a particularly robust topic that cloud users should be aware of. If you want to know more, contact us and we will gladly provide you with more information about these paths.
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