Potential money savings is not the only reason to migrate to the cloud. Many companies cite significant benefits such as increased agility, easier scalability, and even improved security as drivers for transferring data and applications to a Cloud environment.
In reality, a migration to the cloud can end up increasing costs for companies in certain areas, especially if many updates and maintenance are required. Still, there are many ways organizations can save money by moving data, applications, development, and other IT components based on cloud services.
The following 5 ways show how companies can achieve significant cost reductions through the cloud. It’s important to note that the cost impact can vary greatly depending on the company’s current technology infrastructure, the types of applications it runs, the cloud services being used, as well as other factors.
- Stop Unused and Unresponsive Instances: Just as the light in a room is turned off when leaving the room to avoid paying for what is not used, the user should learn to do the same when it does not require public cloud resources. Sometimes a new instance opens for something that takes only a few minutes, but you forget to unsubscribe when you finish using it.
With on-demand instances, you pay for computing capacity by the hour or second (60 seconds minimum) with no long-term commitment.
That is, you never have to explicitly reserve server instances as it happens in PaaS (platform as a service, such as Azure Web Apps, Google App Engine, or AWS Elastic Beanstalk) or of course in IaaS (virtual machines). This is automatically managed from the platform. Each execution of a function could be executed in a different computing instance, being completely transparent to your code.
• Use instance scheduling to start and stop instances on a planned schedule and Utilize your Cloud Provider’s Autoscaling feature: After the initial investment in cloud migration and optimization techniques – resizing, scheduling policies and reserved instances – the total cost of ownership has decreased by 55% for cloud IaaS compared to on-premises deployment.
Cost reduction through optimizing cloud usage time ‘Instance Scheduler’. The biggest feature of cloud services is that customers borrow only the necessary resources and use them without the need to build expensive IT infrastructure. For this reason, most cloud services have a structure that is charged according to data traffic or usage time.
If the method presented by AWS optimizes the cloud service options they offer to save money, it can also save money by optimizing cloud usage time and traffic. Auto Scaling automatically increases and decreases the number of your Amazon EC2 instances to maintain system performance during peak traffic and reduce its capacity during peak periods.
The instance scheduler is a way to compensate for the problem of the EC2 scheduler, which automatically turns on or off the ‘Amazon EC2’ instance of AWS at the time and day set by the user.
• Buy Reserved and Spot (Auctionable) Instances: With reserved instances, you benefit from a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to the on-demand pricing that can result in cost savings of up to 75%. You also have a capacity reservation when they are executed in a specific availability zone.
With Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, you take advantage of unused EC2 capabilities in the AWS cloud. These instances are available with a reduction of up to 90% over on-demand rates. They can be used for static, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as, for example, test and development workloads.
However, most companies do not take advantage of the lowest prices. For example, less than half of AWS customers use AWS Reserved Instances. However, this service offers significant discounts to users who reserve their storage capacity over one to three years. At Microsoft, the same functionality is used by only 23% of customers. Finally, only 10% of Google customers take advantage of these discounts.
Like, Reserved Instances are an option for AWS and customers to set a contract term and receive a discount of up to 60% based on that term. However, it can be a useless service if you do not accurately predict cloud usage period and demand.
For Example: With Spot Instances, customers price Amazon EC2 for unused capacity, and customers who offer a price higher than the current Spot Price can use it.” “The highest price is not the price the user pays. For example, if the user suggested 50 cents per instance at the highest price, and the spot price for the period is 30 cents, the user only has to pay 30 cents. The user has to pay for the right price if the spot instance price goes high.
• Consolidated Billing when you have multiple accounts: Using a consolidated billing account will only require access to one account where all subaccounts under it get the same information, billing reports contain all accounts from all organizations, so even if you have an account in your organization that does not have root access to You can still control costs and, if created as part of the organization, you can also manage the account.
In AWS, for example, each account is a separate logical unit, and only the root account user has access to the billing service (or unique IAM permissions to allow IAM users to access billing). We are talking about managing cost allocation labels, tax information, cost explorer, export reports, tax invoices, and much more. Managing each account separately is a huge expense and can cause a human error, for example setting the wrong tax information and billing the wrong VAT.
· Manage your storage lifecycle: Reduce costs with object storage, and pay only for what you use.
Data storage volumes have grown at a significant rate over the years as organizations gather more information from websites, mobile devices, e-commerce transactions, social media, business apps, and other sources. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing, the growth in data volumes is likely to be even more significant in the coming years.
In particular, customers who are currently using AWS can analyze costs and usage of the current cloud service through cost explorer to reduce costs by reducing unnecessary services or capacity.
Many organizations are turning to the cloud to help manage their Big Data initiatives. The easy scalability of the cloud makes it a potentially ideal model for data storage. But beyond scalability, the cloud can also enable companies to lower their total storage costs.
CONCLUSION
It is important to remember that these best practices are not intended to be one-time activities, but continuous processes. Due to the dynamics and changing nature of the cloud, cost optimization activities should take place on an ongoing basis.
