How to do Cloud Cost Analysis?
The mundane question of cloud cost analysis is based on the fact that I do not want to waste my money, I wanna get the most out of every dollar or pound that I am ready to spend. Technology being one side of the coin there is another side too which is maintenance (you can say maintaining your infra) for cost optimization by doing rigorous cloud cost analysis day in and day out. It is evident as the number of resources, modules, groups grow cloud costing becomes inefficient.
The best way of doing cloud cost analysis is understanding the different factors that impact the cost and leverage cloud cost analysis tools to discover the reason of these inefficiencies and take action then and there.
One of the major reasons for unplanned costs are mostly due to lack of visibility of the cloud infrastructure which leads to indefinite utilization trends, non-standard deployments, uncertain Cloud Ops and many more. It becomes important for an organization to shift their approach where optimizing cost is as important as optimizing performance.
P.s. — Free Cloud Cost Analyzer
Q. How to Lower the Cost of Cloud Computing?
Increase visibility of Cloud Inventory
A recent survey of IT professionals reports 75% of them lack visibility of their cloud resources. This lack of visibility of resources in the cloud often leads to poor management of those resources, hence, higher costs. Cost management begins with an visual analysis of your entire infrastructure when you know and see how your infra is interacting within. Resources that go unmonitored go unused or either are not kept in check but you are still paying for it and ultimately cost increases over time. This cuts into the infrastructure savings and other monetary benefits the cloud brings. Admins who have access to a single pane of glass with detailed resource information are equipped to better organize, manage, and optimize that infrastructure ecosystem across all accounts, clouds, departments, and teams.
Cost Analysis/Projections
The first step is always understanding your infrastructure which in turn provides complete visibility into the cloud services used, the actual usage patterns and trends. Adding to your patterns you need to project your cost so that you can have control over the actions you perform over your infrastructure. Consolidated and granular details in an interactive form so that you can assess and take action across multiple dimensions, as well as time frames.
Regulated Stack Templates
One of the very important characteristic of any DevOps team is to enable more autonomy for teams related to provisioning resources without any blocker and expensive time delay of traditional IT environments. If it is implemented without the automation and process best practices, decentralized teams have the potential to create convoluted and non-standardized security rules, configurations, storage volumes, etc. and therefore driving up costs. The use predefined stack templates, Administrators can add in security, networking, and instance family/size configurations so that the process of deploying instances is not only faster, but aligned with the departmental user’s roles and privileges and ensures only specific resources are provisioned.
Automatic Alerts and Notifications
The thing to do while you sip your first coffee of the day is to stay on top of day-to-day changes in the cloud environment, and participate in critical decisions by sharing standard and custom built reports with details on cost, usage, performance with stakeholders. Automated alerts and notifications about authorization failures, budget overruns, cost spikes, untagged infrastructure result in increased visibility and accountability.
Policy Based Governance
You should be using cloud-based governance tools to track cloud usage and costs and alert administrators when the total usage for the account is greater than a predefined usage or when the total usage for a vendor specific product is greater than a certain value helps control cost. Scheduling operational hours to automatically shut down and start virtual machines, and automated events that alert administrators on volumes that have been disassociated from virtual machines (standalone VMs) for more than a set number of days. Based on event thresholds set by you, remove unused and underutilized resources and avoid unnecessary waste by sizing instances so they deliver a good balance between performance and cost. Avoid cost overrun by using policies to terminate servers created to temporarily handle the massive workloads.
In short, use integrated data sources, metadata, or custom tags to define a set of rules that lead to improved management, reporting, and optimization.
