DevOps Challenges That Every B2B Saas Must Overcome To Succeed: Cloud Cost Optimization

April 18, 2022 | 4 min Read

When you consider the expanding demand for cloud services, as well as the increased availability and diversity, business prices are expected to rise. Your organization may have even begun migrating more services to the cloud in order to benefit from the budget flexibility that the cloud provides. In fact, cost reduction is the main motivation for 47 percent of businesses to migrate to the cloud.

Moving to the cloud can help your company’s bottom line.

Keep in mind that it will not cover all of your expenses. Cloud services account for around a third of a company’s IT spending, according to most estimates. You must first know and learn how to control your costs in the cloud in order to optimize them across the board. The idea is to optimize spending rather than cut costs. Your expenses will almost certainly rise as your company expands and more clients come on board. Profits will definitely increase if those costs are reduced.

Cost Impact

The cloud provides unlimited scalability. It can also help you save money on IT by just billing you for what you use. At the same time, it’s critical to understand that you’re paying for what you order. Up to 70% of cloud costs could be wasted as a result of poor adoption or unused features. Understanding the impact of the cloud on the bottom line is crucial for your company.

Begin measuring the cloud’s impact by defining a business indicator that will help in cost estimate. THIS IS CRITICAL. Cost per pageview, cost per customer, and other metrics are examples of metrics you could be tracking. You can develop a cost report to help you understand how and what you are paying on the cloud if you have a clear image of the metric or metrics you need to measure.

Optimize Your Process

It is time to start optimizing now that you have established your metric. The report you have built will track both current and historical usage. There are a few recommended practices you may implement to get started with optimization.

Phases of Optimization

Before you start, you should divide the optimization process into three stages:

1. Analysis

Analysis is the first step in cost optimization. During this phase, concentrate on getting a better understanding of your present spending and reporting. Against obtain an idea of how your resources are being used, compare current resource usage to current expenditures.

2. Optimize

At this point, you will apply the parts of optimization. These include financial, infrastructure, and application. AWS Savings plans can help you save on costs related to your cloud services. To address infrastructure optimization, use Spot Instances, Preemptible, AWS S3 lifecycle, right-sizing, and automation. Automation involves using on/off and stopping resources that you are not using during specific periods of the week, month, etc. Lastly, you will want to look at applications via application architecture reviews, serverless, microservices, multi-tenancy, cacheability, asset optimization, and storage utilization.

3. Operate

When you begin this phase of the optimization process, you will continuously monitor and keep the optimizations up-to-date. This is not a one-time activity. Cost optimization is an ongoing process. Your company will want to conduct regular cost reviews to help measure and predict your needs.

Tags for Resources

Tagging is an extra feature that will assist you understand your costs and reports in general. Each user-defined key should be labeled or tagged to make it easier to find and manage resources based on criteria like owner, environment, or purpose. Cost allocation tags can be used to keep track of your costs on a more detailed level. This will make it simple and efficient to use your reports.

As more businesses migrate their operations and services to the cloud in order to reduce costs, they will be paying closer attention to cloud spending. If you are one of these companies, you will want to set up tools to help you better estimate cloud costs. As a result, you will be able to scale on demand and adjust dynamically to your cloud needs. Now is the moment to take action and reduce cloud costs.