Top Five Ways To Reduce Cloud Costs
Cloud computing is a cost-effective way to run your business. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s cheap. In fact, cloud costs can be a real concern for companies who don’t have full visibility into their cloud infrastructure or aren’t aware of their rightsizing options. But by following these five strategies—identifying cost-saving opportunities, understanding existing spending, optimizing utilization and utilization tracking, knowing your rightsizing options, and using Reserved Instances—you’ll be able to optimize your cloud usage and reduce costs while improving performance and extending ROI across the entire lifecycle of your applications or workloads:
Understand your current spend
Cloud costs are often compared to the cost of on-premise solutions, but it’s important to understand all the factors determining whether the cloud is right for your organization. This means understanding the cost of both existing solutions and new ones, as well as services from other cloud providers. And, to help you with the smoothest analytics and insights into your cloud computing needs, nOps Amazon Web Services helps you integrate your AWS service with the cost optimization models.
Plus, the sorted version of daily data is pure bliss amidst the chaotic dashboards, CSVs, and excels of AWS data centers. Furthermore, even if the chosen pricing model is not helping you save appropriately, our ShareSave solution can consolidate cloud accounts into a single pricing model and offer ongoing visibility to change requests. This helps you easily manage cloud costs and save more money.
Understand cloud services
The cost of each service can vary greatly depending on the provider, but there are some general rules: larger companies tend to pay less for storage and processing power than smaller ones. Also, many providers offer free trials so that you can test their services before making a commitment (and so they can gather valuable information about how you use their platform).
Optimize utilization
The first step in reducing cloud costs is to identify underutilized resources. This can be done through capacity planning tools that measure utilization and spot instances, which are temporary instances that you pay for only when you use them.
Spot instances can be a good choice if your workloads have spikes of high usage, like batch processing jobs or video encoding jobs. Spot instances are also available with preemptible VM options, meaning Amazon will terminate the instance if it needs it for another customer while your job runs on it (you get charged only for the time it ran). You can even combine these two options: run a batch job using spot instances and then keep using the same instance as a regular one after that!
If your workloads aren’t likely to go into overdrive at any point during their lifecycle, but you’d still like to maximize efficiency without having idle capacity all around, reserved instances are an option worth considering. Reserved instances discount reserved CPU hours or vCPUs per year so long as they’re purchased upfront before use (and not canceled).
Know your rightsizing options.
Rightsizing is the process of scaling a cloud service to match your needs. For example, if you don’t need an entire database and only useonly to use it for running reports, it may be better to scale back on the resources used by that database. This will reduce costs and increase performance because fewer users will access the same resources.
Rightsizing isn’t limited to databases—it can also include virtual machines and other services. If you aren’t sure what rightsizing is or how much money it could save you in cloud costs, nOps Sharesave Scheduler can help automatically rightsize the relevant instances!
Use Reserved Instances
If you’re looking to reduce cloud costs, the best way to do so is by using reserved instances. This method of purchasing cloud infrastructure takes the guesswork out of calculating your cost savings by setting a price per hour or month, and then overpaying a little bit.
This means that when you purchase an instance, you know your monthly bill will be $X every month for as long as it remains active—even if that number is higher than what you would have paid otherwise!
Conclusion
The cloud is an amazing resource for businesses, but it’s not always the most cost-effective option. The best way to reduce cloud costs is by minimizing usage and optimizing your infrastructure. That means that you need to be smart about how much you use in order to keep costs down. nOps can help here!
nOps is a fully automated FinOps platform that helps companies automatically identify and eliminate cloud waste. Its USP stands in its unique pricing model, i.e., you only pay for what you save as only a percentage of your actual saving streamlined through nOps will be charged. With our Share Save solution, you can consolidate cloud accounts into a single pricing model and offer ongoing visibility to change requests. This helps you easily manage cloud costs and save more money. Sign up for nOps today. With nOps, you don’t pay unless we are saving you money.