Five Ways to Control Your Cloud Spend in 2023

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Five Ways to Control Your Cloud Spend in 2023 

According to a recent Gartner study, businesses spent two to three times as much on cloud computing than they initially anticipated. Why is this the case, and how can businesses better manage costs? Pay-as-you-go models of IT budget forecasting rely on ongoing monitoring and evaluations rather than annual capital planning and budgeting, and unless cost management is incorporated into your cloud strategy, cost overruns can easily happen. This article will cover five methods for reducing cloud costs that include the use of automation and application process management (APM) tools to improve capacity and cost management. We will also look at the use of containers to lower cloud computing costs.  By incorporating these suggestions, companies can significantly reduce their spending on cloud services and maximize efficiency.

Infrastructure as code to automate capacity management

Right-sizing is crucial for any organization looking to reduce costs and ensuring that their resources are used efficiently. Amazon Web Services (AWS) recommends right-sizing your requirements by first selecting the smallest instance to meet the performance requirements of your workloads.  Infrastructure as code allows businesses to create an automated workflow for capacity management that scales up or down as per their need. This way you don’t have to second guess and manually configure your infrastructure needs.This automated approach ensures resource utilization optimization which helps in reducing costs and improving performance at the same time.  Remember that data and compute instances are separated on the cloud. You may shut down an application and the associated virtual machine, but the data continues to occupy real estate  that you end up paying for. Infrastructure as code can also be leveraged to reduce cloud sprawl and set up automated provisioning for old and unnecessary workloads, such as orphaned databases.

Application Performance Management Tools

A poorly-optimized application can lead to increased infrastructure usage causing cost overruns. Application Performance Management (APM) tools are a powerful solution to automate capacity management and achieve right-sizing objectives. They provide companies the ability to proactively monitor and optimize performance in real-time, while exposing any underlying issues with the architecture. In addition, they can also be used to improve performance of applications running on public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and others. With features such as auto scaling capabilities, custom monitoring dashboards and alerts, it is now possible for companies to fully control and manage costs for their cloud-based deployments across multiple public cloud providers.

Rearchitecting into Microservices, Serverless Applications & Leveraging Containers

Rearchitecting your apps, utilizing microservices, developing serverless applications, and utilizing containers will result in the program being optimized for the cloud, resulting in a better use of cloud resources and more efficient cost management. Application deployment in the cloud can especially be made affordable and effective by containerization. With containerization, operations as a whole run more smoothly since developers can concentrate on creating apps as microservices without thinking about scalability or infrastructure requirements, which reduces the complexity of resource management. For instance, a container service, such as Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS), ensures that compute power is always accessible for your applications while Kubernetes is used to coordinate and scale containers. As a result, these technologies assist in maintaining more flexible and economical cloud usage.

Cloud Cost Management Platforms

Cloud cost management platforms provide an easy-to-use, comprehensive solution for managing cloud costs. They allow companies to accurately forecast, analyze and control how much they are spending on their projects. Cost Management Platforms provided by cloud providers, such as Amazon Cloud Watch, Azure Cost Management + Billing, as well as platform agnostic solutions  help control IT infrastructure costs by setting hard budget limits, breaking down cloud costs in detail and allowing to view current and past spending trends over time. This way enterprises can get a better understanding of how they’re using their resources, where potential savings can be had, and build up processes that ensure predictable costs going forward. AWS also recommends keeping reserved instances at discounted rates and keeping your usage ‘elastic’ to keep your costs down. The problem is how do you determine what levels of instances are right for your workload requirements? You need a team of experts to help you with the initial assessment and get you on the right path for optimized capacity management through infrastructure as code. 

Leverage Skills of Experts

Hiring cloud cost optimization experts is increasingly becoming an essential part of managing IT costs.  Enterprise-grade cloud experts can help your organization negotiate Service Level Agreements (SLAs), implement infrastructure as code, automate infrastructure operations, control costs, and improve security. With expertise in cloud technology and cost management practices, these experts can help you get the most out of your cloud solutions without overspending.  Moreover, they can also help you develop well-informed strategies that will bring down the cost of running IT infrastructure on the cloud while still achieving desired performance.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is quickly becoming a key component for many businesses. Organizations need to ensure that their cloud strategy is properly aligned with current and long-term business objectives in order to maximize the benefits of moving to the cloud. This includes addressing scalability and efficiency concerns as well developing solutions to reach maximum cost efficiency. A cloud migration & optimization partner can provide you with the technologies, processes, and tools to help you manage your costs most effectively.

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