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Your Cloud Environment Needs Optimization Featured

Your Cloud Environment Needs Optimization "A toy blue car on a roadmap of the Denver, Colorado area."

Cloud computing is a good thing for businesses. However, adopting it presents several challenges. While there are many issues you can encounter, managing spending may be one of the most demanding of them all. According to a survey of over 750 enterprises, 30% considered their cloud spending wasteful, while 80 percent stated that managing their spending is a challenge. Although the goal of moving to the cloud is to reduce the cost of operations, sometimes, the cost can remain high. However, here are some strategies you can use to optimize the cost of the cloud.

  1. Develop a plan

Without a concrete plan, your spending will be chaotic, and you will not manage your expectations. As such, avoid using random tactics and create a workable and realistic budget that will allow you to stay within a given forecast. Develop a capability and run processes before you can deploy applications, projects and workloads in the cloud of your choice. Define the requirement to identify the exact outcomes that may impact cloud services and keep from over-engineering applications. Ask questions like, how sensitive is the data being handled by the workload? What will happen if data become unavailable? What is the desired performance target?

In this step, you should choose the pricing models that suit your organization. This may vary depending on various factors like data integrity, service availability and performance targets. Generally, find the pricing model that meets your budget and your organization's needs.

  1. Increase the visibility of spend

When you have created your budget, established your pricing model and deployed your application, the next step should be to ensure that visibility is maintained. Create an organized view of costs aside from the bill itself. The amount of data makes managing each item line difficult and may not allow you to get a view of daily spending. You can achieve this by defining the metrics that are critical to track for your company. The metrics will be crucial for building dashboards and reports and helps in maintaining workflow to optimize spending. Some metrics you should look into include the cost of services, capacity, availability, performance and utilization.

  1. Minimize spending

Once your goals are set, and visibility enabled, you should identify ways of reducing spending. The process of reducing waste is the third step after the two above. It becomes easy to reduce waste without changing the application code or architecture. It is also easy to implement and calculate return on investment (ROI) with tracking already made possible. To minimize spending, the methods you can use include:

  1. Discarding unused resources

Although this measure may appear obvious, it is uncommon for many organizations and traditional data centers. Therefore, find resources that have been deployed by your organization and not used. Ensure that the resources that are outdated or unused resources are removed.

  1. Schedule services

Every organization has resources that are idle at specific hours or days. You need to minimize waste by scheduling cloud services based on the patterns.

  1. Optimize resources

Minimizing spending includes reducing the need for certain resources. To improve performance, you need to start by finding preemptive instances. For instance, some cloud providers offer a much lower price point for compute instead of the pay-as-you-go model. You need to identify components and use cases in your app architecture that are suitable in this case. Other ways of optimizing resources include adjusting data storage and utilizing serverless computing, which helps in autoscaling, dynamic deployment and improving efficiencies in the utilization of resources. Another great choice is to use horizontal autoscaling.

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Scott Koegler

Scott Koegler is Executive Editor for PMG360. He is a technology writer and editor with 20+ years experience delivering high value content to readers and publishers. 

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