AWS & Azure Cloud Cost Optimization Practices

Cloud Optimization, a good modern-day workplace practice, is the process of adopting and earmarking the right (virtual) assets to a workload or application. When workload performance, compliance, and the cost is poised against the best-fit resources, optimization is said to be achieved. Both casual and firm users tend to disregard these optimization practices, or are only aware of some of them.

It is beneficial for organizations in the form of:

● Cost Reduction: When using cloud services, you wouldn’t have to worry about spending huge amounts of money on purchasing and maintaining equipment. This greatly reduces all capex costs. Zero investment in hardware, facilities, utilities, or building out a large data center can help grow your business immensely .

● Efficiency: You don’t require IT Teams to maintain and fix your infrastructure, you enjoy in-package benefits of your Cloud Service Provider’s in-house team of experts.

● Data Security: Cloud Providers provide protection from data breaches and leaks, through encryption, remote saving, access control and multiple-factor authentication.

● Scalability: As your business grows, so can your Cloud Service Package. It provides almost unlimited scalability.

● Mobility: You can access your data from anywhere, and collaborate on your work in real-time, syncing it across all your devices.

AWS Cloud and Cost Optimization Practices

Amazon’s AWS is an excellent platform to help scale your IT requirements immensely. Being one of the best offerings out there, it also comes at a great cost if not optimized correctly. Here are a few best practices you can employ with your package to save as much as you can!

1) The easiest way to optimize and reduce these cloud costs is to look for unused or unemployed assets. Often users might “initiate” a temporary server to perform a specific function, and forget to disable after the function has been completed.

A good cloud cost optimization strategy for AWS should be to start by identifying unused and completely unattached resources and removing them. Such functions and instances also include Obsolete Snapshots (read ‘Backups’), EBS Volumes, unattached Elastic IPv4 addresses and EC2 Instances. Similarly, corresponding volumes and instances could be unattached for Azure Cost Optimization.

2) Rightsizing Instances: The purpose of rightsizing is to match instance sizes to their workloads. Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that because of the way in which instances double in capacity for every single increase in size. You double the capacity when you go up one size, and you also have the capacity when you go down one size. Hence, rightsizing can be considered a best practice only when there are instances whose peak utilization is not over 45%.

3) Scheduling Off Times: You can schedule/automate ‘off’ times for non-production instances used for developing, staging, testing, and QA, allowing you to save upto 65% with an ‘On’ time corresponding to the respective firm’s work hours during workdays. You can potentially save a lot more with fewer hours.

4) Purchase Reserved Nodes and Instances: Upgrades your instances and nodes to the latest generation to enjoy cost optimization benefits with special offerings Reserved Instances/Nodes at monthly payments or partially up-front costs. These ‘heavy utilization’ discounts are only available with the aforementioned conditions.

5) Moving low-frequented data to lower cost packages. This will allow you to cost optimize your AWS package by saving more space for higher priority data and eliminating any Zombie assets.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Some general cloud cost optimization techniques that can be employed regardless of whether you use Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure or even Google’s Cloud are as followed:

● Find Unused and Unattached Resources.

● Identify Idle Resources and Remove or Terminate them.

● Use Heatmaps to identify.

● Right Size all your instances and other computing services.

● Use Spot Instances to save costs and have an upper hand.

● Shift to the Multi-Cloud model from the Single Cloud Model.

If the aforementioned checks are executed correctly, it brings you a much greater return on your cloud spending's!

Azure Cloud and Cost Optimization

To optimize and gain the most out of your Cloud Investment on Microsoft’s Azure, you need to keep a check on some basic practices:

● Right Sizing your VMs: Similar to rightsizing EC2 Instances in AWS, right sizing and checking your Linux VMs is considered a good practice.

● Using B Series Virtual Machines: Azure provides a vast series of VMs, with the most cost effective one being B-Series Machines. These packages are generally firms with low to medium cloud requirements. B-Series Virtual Machines usually utilize a baseline level of CPU power, while getting you credits for the watts you don’t use! You can use these credits in-case of CPU usage surges.

● Shifting or Repackaging to Containers like Azure Kubernetes Service: These are more lightweight than VMs, and are extremely suitable and cost effective for most businesses. It decreases your VM utilization considerably, saving you a lot more!

● Delete your Virtual Disks when terminating Virtual Machines: Microsoft’s Azure won’t do it for you.

● Use Elastic Databases instead of VM Databases: If you’re one of those companies wishing to run a SQL or a similar Server, it would be advisable to use elastic databases to avoid the high load costs for VMs.

● Use cloud volume and enterprise-grade storage solutions which provide solutions and features such as provisioning, data compression and Deduplication.

Listed above are some of the best and most commonly used practices, but Cloud and Cost Optimization are not limited to those. Explore, analyze and employ whichever works for you!