You can reduce cloud costs

Migrating to the cloud has become a widespread notion among enterprises. They understand how important and competitive it is to move to the cloud. However, the biggest challenge is to manage the cloud costs. The public cloud providers are offering services at very competitive prices to attract more enterprises. But saving money does not end with selecting the competitive cloud provider, but there are other factors. Some of the factors are usually missed or overlooked by the IT team initially that can increase the cloud cost in a later stage. Fortunately, enterprises can easily control the unwanted cloud bill. 

Estimate The Cost Before The Migration

The first step to manage your cloud cost is to evaluate the cloud cost before migrating your infrastructure to the cloud. Every cloud service provider offers different billing models, and you can check and compare estimates before selecting the cost-effective option. 

Wastage Is Always Harmful

Cloud wastage is when enterprises deploy more resources than they need and/or keep the resources idle while paying the bill for these resources. Selecting the right cloud provider can be your best move towards saving money on the cloud bill. 

Tools That You Need To Understand Cloud Cost Composition

Before we start saving, we need to understand the cost composition of cloud service providers, and every provider has different categories of costs associated with the total cloud cost. Here are the tools to help you to analyze the costs and recommend you some cost-saving suggestions 

· Azure: Cost advisor, Cloudyn

· AWS:Trusted advisor, Cost management

· GCP: Cost management

Save Costs on Servers | Save Costs on Storage | Get Business Discounts

Start with saving costs on servers

1 – Turn off Servers:

• Turn off idle servers (Not being used).
• Rightsizing (You can adjust the server size depending on the usage).

The tools mentioned above can help you to understand which server is idle and need to be optimized.

2 – Reserved Instances

 RI can save you costs on servers if you commit to a long-term contract between 1-3 years. This approach is appropriate for enterprises having long term commitment, a minimum one year. One year commitment usually gives you a 30-40% discount while three years of commitment give you a 60% discount. However, if you want to cancel the commitment, there are multiple ways to get out of the RI commitment:

• You can replace the current commitment with different server offers 

• Directly cancel the commitment and pay the fine 

3 – Spot Instances

Spot servers are considered low priority servers, and cheaper than regular servers with the same power. What is the catch in this? Why don’t most of the enterprises opt for the spot instances then? Here is the catch; these servers are the low priority, so you have the risk that they can be closed suddenly without notice. However, there are some ways to avoid this incident of losing your server with this approach:

• Having not critical workloads in these servers, if the server gets closed, you can turn them on again.

• Having a queue approach work, in case the server is closed, your task will be remained in a queue. 

4 – Serverless/Autoscaling Architectures

Serverless does not mean there is no sever!

Autoscaling architecture ensures that no server is idle; whenever you need more server for workloads, it will automatically scale up the servers. Serverless functions occur only whenever it is needed without the need for the servers. Having a well-defined cloud architecture will help you save costs on the cloud bill. 

Save Cost On Storage 

There are top 5 categories of cloud storage. Enterprises with a solid strategy of using storage services according to their needs can save costs on their cloud bill 

• Archive storage
• Object storage
• File storage 
• Block storage
• Database storage

Depending on the redundancy speed, each cost category is charged.

Usually, enterprises can store the raw data in the cheap storage category, while metadata used in queries should be stored in the expensive storage category. 

Archive storage the cheapest one; however, it gives slow retrieval of the data. Next to this is object storage, which is the most common choice of enterprises when it comes to storage. 

Enterprises should have a storage lifecycle to keep the old files stored in the cheaper storage option. Some of the major cloud service providers offer this feature. 

Get Business Discounts

Cloud service provider and their listed partners run various lucrative offers and programs to attract the enterprises. One can compare the offers and use resources from different cloud providers to save costs based on their offers and discounts.