Cloud Costs Reduction Tactics

Cloud operation costs can be reduced.

Costs of your cloud operations (be it in IaaS, Paas, or SaaS), a lot of it is in your own hand and also with the tools and options provided by cloud vendors.

Yet, there are catches! As most of the tactics might be in place to hook you to a particular ecosystem and make you pay later. So, decide carefully and take care of your business needs first.

Let’s look at some of the factors that might help you reduce or optimize your cloud operations costs.

Design of Your Applications

The biggest contributor to cost reduction is effective application architecture. If you are pushing a monolithic application, utilizing an upfront lamda, then the gains from the cloud architecture will be minimal. In such cases, if there is a load on a single service, then you will have to scale your entire application.

A better approach to tackling this situation is to reconstruct the app using Microservices Architecture. This enables you to truly scale the parts of the application that is under load. With this architecture, based upon your usage patterns, you can also budget resources as needed.

Unused Servers

Not all the servers or cloud services are needed all the time. Such unused servers do end up increasing your cloud bill. So, its best to rent out services for storage or compute as needed and then downscale once the service isn’t required anymore.

For example, you can identify and delete unattached persistent storage disks to reduce costs. Also, you can turn off non-production AWS EC2 instances when they are not needed.

Go Serverless — Use Services

Going serverless and using services as FaaS (functions as service) can help you massively to reduce your cloud bills.

You also have the option of transitioning to completely cloud-native architecture and most of the cloud vendors will also push you to do so. But you need to be careful with this approach. As you might avail discounts to begin with but you can also become a victim of price play, once such players become a monopoly. That’s why many application architects would still use a hybrid architecture and work with services as per the business needs.

Costs Management Tools

Visibility of your operations and its associated costs is the first step towards effectively managing your bills.

So to manage your bills proactively, you can utilize tools like Google Orbitera. Such tools not only gives you the ability to manage costs but also enable you to track multi-cloud billing.

Make a Long-term Commitment

Reserving instance can help you with availing discounts. Showing long term commitment is awarded by all of the cloud providers. So, if you commit to 1–2 years of utilization and you foresee business demands to stay constant, do opt for this mechanism.

Remember though, if your business needs change and you have to exit from the contact, you might need to pay penalties and fees. So, plan accordingly.

Startups Discounts

In case you are a startup, you have the option of searching for startup discounts. And such discounts are offered by almost all cloud providers. The reason is simple all cloud operators are in search of the new facebook to start using their system early on and be dependant on them to charge them later. So, if you are in infancy, utilize those discounts/credits.

Summing Up

The above discussion talks about a few macro-level changes that can have a major impact on your cloud bills.

Planning upfront pays and you should work with options that are in your domain and are also provided by the cloud vendors. But always keep your business needs and the changing demands of it supreme, as you never know when a certain cloud vendor might change their business model.