If you want to save money on cloud spending, you need to spend time and engineering resources on cost management. Here’s a better way to do it.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. The pay-per-use model of the public cloud seemed too good to be true. And you probably quickly caught onto its catch: analyzing and predicting your cloud costs is like driving blindfolded hoping that the street traffic would stay the same. A solid cloud cost management strategy and tooling solves this problem – but only partially. Knowing what your costs are and where your costs come from isn’t going to reduce them magically. It’s a good start, but you still need engineering resources to implement the changes. And not just once, but on a regular basis – or whenever you see a savings opportunity, note a peak usage scenario, or too much shadow IT starts creeping in. Is there a better way to control your cloud spend? Keep on reading to find out. Jumping on the public cloud bandwagon too fast can make that wagon tip over. Most teams find controlling cloud costs challenging because they never had so much freedom in spinning up new instances and experimenting with different things. Even those who never used anything other than the public cloud struggle to control their cloud spend. Here are some common reasons why cloud costs spiral out of control: Legacy cost visibility, allocation, and management dashboards helped to solve some of these problems, but not all. Cloud cost management is an umbrella term for cost monitoring, reporting, visibility, allocation, budgeting, and forecasting. The goal here is to understand and manage the costs associated with public cloud resources. It means knowing where costs come from, to which teams they can be allocated, and how much you’re likely to spend in the future. The last one is particularly important for CFOs, who aren’t too pleased when they have to restate the quarterly results because someone left an expensive instance running for too long. Cloud cost management is all about control – or, gaining more granular control over the cloud spend while keeping the same level of performance. Most cloud providers offer basic cloud cost management solutions to help them achieve that. There are also plenty of specialized third-party tools that offer extra visibility and insight into your cloud expenses. Predicting cloud expenses is hard, even if you’re a tech giant like Pinterest. During the 2018 holiday season, the company’s cloud spend went way beyond the initial estimates due to increased usage. Pinterest had to pay AWS $20 million on top of the $170 million worth of cloud resources it already reserved. Using the public cloud is all about striking the balance between cost and performance. Traffic spikes can either generate a massive and unforeseen cloud bill if you leave your check open or cause your application to crash if you put rigid limits over its resources.
