Learn how to handle the long-term cost implications of the cloud with proven cloud cost optimization techniques including automation.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. The cloud’s scalability is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, you can experiment with new ideas without having to worry about getting another rack of servers. But if you’re reading this, you know there’s a price to pay for this comfort. Overprovisioning and cloud sprawl are real. They will make even a tech giant CFO’s eye twitch at the end of the quarter. Take Pinterest as an example. During one holiday season, the company’s cloud bill went way over the initial estimates because of increased usage and Pinterest had to pay AWS $20 million on top of the $170 million worth of reserved resources. The only way you can deal with the long-term cost implications of the cloud is by implementing cloud cost optimization. And if you don’t want optimization to become a drag on your engineering team, automating it is the only move that gets you there. Check out this guide to optimizing cloud costs step-by-step: Is optimizing cloud costs worth your time? Take a look at the optimization gains reported by companies in communication, entertainment, SaaS, and e-commerce: Now that you know that it’s worth playing the optimization game, let’s see what methods teams choose to prevent their cloud costs from spiraling out of control. Take a look at your cloud bill and you’re likely to get lost. Bills are long, complex, and hard to unpack because every service has a defined billing metric. Understanding your usage to the point where you can make a decision confidently is next to impossible. And we’re talking about analyzing costs for only one cloud and one team. Try billing for multiple teams or clouds! This is where cost allocation comes in and reveals who is using which resources. How else can you make anyone accountable for these costs? Cost allocation is especially challenging in dynamic infrastructures running on Kubernetes. Why is it worth examining and allocating costs based on your cloud bill? Because it’s a treasure trove of data that will help you forecast your requirements better and secure the right amount of resources (and avoid the curse of overprovisioning!). But estimating your future resource demands is no small feat. Here’s an example sequence you may follow: The tasks listed above aren’t one-off jobs. You need to do that on a regular basis to get results. Choosing the right virtual machine can be a huge game-changer if your application relies on compute.
