Cost optimization
Many have the misconception that moving to the cloud will become an instant cost saver for their company or organization. A stark reality is faced once more, and more teams find out that provisioning new resources is as easy as clicking a button. Once the bills start appearing from an environment that doesn't have strict guardrails or the ability to chargeback the workloads to the corresponding teams, most of the time, there comes a cost reduction movement from the top down.
As you look to optimize your costs, understand that cloud services that have been proven to be managed services come at a high cost per minute; however, the human resources cost is much lower. There is no need to care and feed the underlying servers, nor worry about updating the underlying operating systems. Many of the services allow you to scale to user demands, and this is taken care of for you automatically.
The ability to monitor cost and usage is also a key element in a cost optimization strategy. Having a sound strategy for resource tagging allows those who are responsible for financially managing the AWS account to perform chargebacks for the correct department.
There are five design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:
- Implementing cloud financial management
- Adopting a consumption model
- Measuring overall efficiency
- Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
- Analyzing and attributing expenditure
Implementing cloud financial management
Cloud financial management is something that is starting to grow across organizations, both big and small, rapidly. It takes a dedicated team (or a group of team members that has been partially allocated this responsibility) to build out the ability to see where the cloud spend is going. This part of the organization will be looking at the cost usage reports, setting the budget alarms, tracking the spend, and hopefully enforcing a costing tag that can show the chargebacks for each department, cost center, or project.
What is a chargeback?
An IT chargeback is a process that allows units to associate costs with specific departments, offices, or projects to try and accurately track the spend of IT. We are specifically referring to cloud spend in this example, but IT chargebacks are used in other areas of IT as well, such as for accounting purposes.
Adopting a consumption model
Using the cloud doesn't require a sophisticated forecasting model to keep costs under control, especially when you have multiple environments. Development and testing environments should have the ability to spin down or be suspended when not in use, hence saving on charges when they would otherwise be sitting idle. This is the beauty of on-demand pricing in the cloud. If developers gripe over the loss of data, then educate them on the use of snapshotting database instances before shutting them down; then, they can start their development from where they left off.
An even better strategy is to automate the process of shutting down the development and test environments when the workday is finished and require a specialized tag, which would prevent an instance from being shut down after hours or on the weekend. You can also automate the process of restarting instances 30 to 60 minutes before the workday begins so that there is ample time for operating systems to become functional, allowing the team to think that they had never been turned off in the first place. Just be sure to watch out for any EC2 instances running on the instance store that may lose data.
Measuring overall efficiency
One of the most evident ways that organizations lose efficiency when it comes to their cloud budgets is neglecting to decommission unused assets. Although it is easier to spin up new services and create backups in the cloud, not having a plan to retire depreciated data, volume backups, machine images, log files, and other items adds to the bottom line of the monthly bill. This should be done with a scalpel and not a machete. Data, once deleted, is gone and irretrievable; however, there is no need to keep everything forever. Even with compliance, there is a fade-out period, and data can be stored in cold storage at a much more reasonable rate.
A perfect example is EBS snapshots. A customer who is trying to be proactive about data protection may be both snapshotting volumes multiple times per day as well as copying those snapshots to a Disaster Recovery region. If there is no way to depreciate the old snapshots after 30, 60, or 90 days, then this cost center item can become an issue rather quickly.
Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
When we talk about heavy lifting, we're talking about racking, stacking, and cooling servers in a data center. Running a data center is a 24/7/365 endeavor, and you can't easily turn off machines and storage when you're not using them. Moving workloads to the cloud takes the onus of running those data centers off your team members and allows more time and effort to go into focusing on customer needs and features, rather than caring for and feeding servers and hardware.
Analyzing and attributing expenditure
The cloud – and the AWS cloud, in particular – has tools available to help you analyze and reference where the charges for your account(s) are coming from. The first tool in your toolbox is tags and a tagging strategy. Once you have decided on a solid set of base tags, including things such as cost center, department, and application, then you have a foundation for the rest of the tools that are available to you.
Breaking out from a single account structure into multiple accounts and organizational units using AWS Organizations can automatically categorize spend, even without the use of tags at the account level.
AWS Cost Explorer allows your financial management team to dig into the services and regions where spend is occurring, as well as create automatic dashboards to visualize the spend quickly. Amazon Web Services also has pre-set service quotas in place, some of which are hard quotas that cannot be changed, but many of which are soft quotas that allow you to raise the number of particular services (in a region) in a simple request.
