Limiting Run Cost in Cloud Environment

To make intelligent decisions, you need data. By analysing where your money is going interms of the cloud consumption, you can compare your costs to your utilization to discover where you might have waste within your cloud environment. Everyone in organization must engage in the cost management lifecycle. They need to stay involved on an ongoing basis to optimize costs. Be rigorous about this iterative process and make it a key tenet of responsible cloud governance in the organization.

An export of your billing data is available at any time. By using your billing data, you can track where your costs are going and how they're allocated across cloud resources. One challenge for you is that the billing data shows your costs but not your utilization. You'll have data that indicates you're paying for a large VM, but how much are you actually using it?

Cloud Cost Management tool gives insights into where your spend is going, as well as underutilized resources. Cloud Cost Management tracks your total spend, cost by service, and cost over time. You can drill down into resource types and instances. You can also break down costs by organization or cost center by tagging resources with those categories.

One of the key features of Cloud Cost Management is the ability to configure alerts that are based on spending. These alerts can provide immediate visibility into spending that might be exceeding your budget. You can then take steps to address these costs. The important part is to take time to review your spend and evaluate where your money is going. Effective analysis will help you identify areas of inefficiency, and ensure you're operating as cost-effectively as possible.

After you have your Cloud services running, you should regularly check your costs to track your Cloud spending. You can use cost analysis to understand where the costs originated for your Cloud usage. Take time as an organization to regularly meet and review billing and expenditures that are related to cloud services. Review the respective expenditures with the technical and business stakeholders for each application. This brings increased visibility to the costs that are associated with an application, and the decisions made from a cost perspective.

Cost optimization levers

The principles of cost optimization are a series of important considerations that can help achieve both business objectives and cost justification.

Aim for scalable costs: A key benefit of the cloud is the ability to scale dynamically. The workload cost should scale linearly with demand. You can save cost through automatic scaling. Consider the usage metrics and performance to determine the number of instances. Choose smaller instances for a highly variable workload and scale out to get the required level of performance, rather than up. This choice will enable you to make your cost calculations and estimates granular.

1. Pay for consumption: Adopt a leasing model instead of owning infrastructure. Cloud offers many SaaS and PaaS resources that simplify overall architecture. The cost of hardware, software, development, operations, security, and data center space included in the pricing model. Also, choose to pay-as-you-go over fixed pricing. That way, as a consumer, you're charged for only what you use.
2. Keep within the cost constraints: Every design choice has cost implications. Before choosing an architectural pattern, Cloud service, or a price model for the service, consider the budget constraints for the organization. As part of design, identify acceptable boundaries on scale, redundancy, and performance against cost. After estimating the initial cost, set budgets and alerts at different scopes to measure the cost. One of cost drivers can be unrestricted resources. These resources typically need to scale and consume more cost to meet demand.
3. Right resources, right size: Choose the right resources that are aligned with business goals and can handle the performance of the workload. An inappropriate or misconfigured service can impact cost. For example, building a multi-region service when the service levels don't require high-availability or geo-redundancy will increase cost without any reasonable business justification. Certain infrastructure resources are delivered as fix-sized building blocks. Ensure that these blocks are adequately sized to meet capacity demand, deliver expected performance without wasting resources.
4. Monitor and optimize: Treat cost monitoring and optimization as a process, rather than a point-in-time activity. Conduct regular cost reviews and measure and forecast the capacity needs so that you can provision resources dynamically and scale with demand. Review the cost management recommendations and take action to optimize workload costs. Use Advisor Score to identify the greatest opportunities for cost optimization for your workload.