Old IT paradigms are not enough for managing the cloud environment, as they don’t hold promise to power operating models with automation and make them more dynamic. To garner value from the cloud, key areas, namely, performance, cost, and consumption must be optimized. Besides these areas, improvements in data, machine learning, and networking must also be prioritized alongside cloud optimization. But how do organizations benefit from all this?
Key Benefits of Cloud Optimization
- With a highly resilient architecture, the cloud reduces downtime by nearly 60%, as estimated by McKinsey. This is the case for applications migrated to the cloud, which results in a cost reduction of over 25%. Thus, by making smarter investments organizations are left with more budget for focusing on other projects and upgrading their IT.
- Transparency is the only e-gate to cost control. Accurate and more meaningful reporting comes with monitoring how much every business unit in the organization is spending and through visibility into areas that unlock latent potential for efficiency.
- Cloud optimization goes beyond controlling costs. With improved visibility into the cloud environment, organizations gain greater confidence in scaling and strategizing the service consumption.
- The need for technology expertise continues to spur. On the other hand, organizations lack in-house capabilities, creating an absence of cloud skills. Optimizing the cloud environment bridges this gap, providing organizations with access to certified specialists that complement their in-house IT team.
Rightsizing – Setting the Base for Cloud Optimization
Most organizations are unable to identify the way their resources become under-provisioned or over-provisioned. Determining the resources that are not provisioned properly or preventing it from occurring needs rightsizing of the cloud. This delivers organizations with cost reduction and infrastructure optimization.
Let’s consider a scenario where there are some assets that are not being used by an organization. This incident occurred because the assets weren’t turned off or they faced a failure due to errors in the script. However, the organizations will be charged for such assets nevertheless, as they are running continuously even if they aren’t being used. Rightsizing helps to terminate such assets and reduce the waste of money for the organization.
Organizations can also leverage the right tools for measuring their cloud consumption metrics and rightsize their infrastructure effectively. These tools recommend necessary rectifications across instance clusters, wherever necessary.
Best Practices for Cloud Optimization
Going Multi-Cloud
Preventing vendor lock-in is a primary reason why organizations opt for multi-cloud, which in turn allows them to enhance uptime and achieve high availability. However, there is one drawback involved and that is losing good discounts with a single cloud vendor. All that organizations must focus on is being aware of all the options and managing their cloud vendors well to avoid administrative hassles of toggling between different environments.
Using Reserved Instances
Reserved instances are for organizations that have been or look to leveraging the cloud for longer durations. These instances come off as huge enablers of cost savings vis-à-vis commitment to time and hence, they sum up to be a ‘must-have’ in a cloud optimization strategy. Analyzing past cloud consumption and being ready for future endeavours are key considerations for utilizing reserved instances for a longer time period.
Identifying Idle Resources
Addressing idle resources is an adjuvant to locating idle resources, wherein enterprises confront waste when they receive the bill for idle resources. Consolidating such resources must be an essential practice of cloud optimization among organizations. Moreover, they must look to harness the full potential of the cloud’s autoscaling, on-demand provisioning, and load balancing capabilities.
Leveraging Spot Instances
There is a key difference between spot instances and reserved instances. They help organizations save more on cloud spending. Spot instances, when available at a lucrative price, must be purchased to cater to immediate use cases. Even though spot Instances must be included in a cloud optimization plan, the only crunch is that opportunities to purchase spot instances are low. So, proper planning is necessary when it comes to leveraging spot instances.
Locating Unused Resources
There are times when system administrators fail to eliminate linked storage while removing instances. In other cases, developers or system administrators scale up a server for performing necessary functions but fail to plug it off after the task is done. The resources that remain in the aforementioned cases are unused, resulting in added costs in the bills getting generated. A good cloud optimization strategy will involve identifying and removing these unused resources for saving costs.
To Sum Up
The most feasible way for optimizing cloud environments and cost is by partnering with one of the credible cloud vendors, such as Blazeclan, which is an AWS Premier Partner and MS Azure Gold Partner. For example, Blazeclan’s empowered a leading data and software solutions provider to improve their resources control and achieve significant cost optimization on the Azure cloud.
A holistic cloud optimization strategy will leave no stone unturned for organizations and generate savings to use for optimization itself. If cloud optimization is done regularly, it will ensure that demands are met through high performance.
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