Cloud computing has revolutionized our business, and it’s not going anywhere. But, like all things, there are costs associated with using cloud services. If you aren’t careful, those costs can quickly add up. In this post, I will share three ways you can reduce the cost of cloud computing to help keep your IT budget under control.
Table of Contents
1. Right-sizing compute
One of the best things you can do to reduce cloud costs is right-size computing. That means matching the right amount of computing to your workload. It’s like putting on an article of clothing that doesn’t fit—you spend more time and money trying to make it work than if you’d just bought the correct size in the first place.
This type of sizing is especially important because when you’re working with a public cloud provider, they usually charge by the hour or day, meaning that even if nothing runs on your instance for hours at a time, there’s still cost associated with having it up and running (storage and networking being two common examples). You also don’t want too much excess capacity running because that wastes money—and remember: it’s better to be overprovisioned than underprovisioned!
You can use cloud cost management tools like nOps to get started with right-sizing your instances; these tools will analyze your workloads and suggest changes based on what their algorithms determine as best practices for managing costs in public clouds—and sometimes private ones too!
2. Use Reserved Instances
You might have heard of reserved instances, but what are they? Essentially, these allow you to reserve a certain instance for use for a specific period of time. For example, if you know that your application will need an m4.large instance from June 1st through October 31st (a total of 90 days), then you could purchase a three-month reserved instance at once and lock in the cost per hour. This can save you significant amounts over the course of a month or longer.
You can do this directly on the AWS website by navigating to “Reserved Instances” under “Spot Pricing” in the left navigation bar and selecting how many instances will be reserved and when they’ll start being used by clicking on “Select Dates.” It’s important to note that while options may be available during some times of the year, not all regions will offer them all year long—you’ll need to check availability before making any purchases here!
You can also automate this process using tools like nOps Sharesave Scheduler, which automatically identifies when prices are low enough for your company’s needs before purchasing reservations automatically via API calls into the AWS Marketplace web portal (which allows access using an API key).
3. Optimize storage
Take advantage of your cloud provider’s tiered storage and compression. These features increase the amount of content that can be stored for the same price, thereby reducing costs overall. Tiered storage is especially useful because it lets users choose a price point based on how much data they want to store. Compression shrinks file sizes while preserving their contents, thus saving space and lowering costs by storing more data in less space—a win-win! Data de-duplication works similarly to compression, but it removes redundant information within files so that only one copy needs to be stored rather than multiple copies of identical information (e.g., two files with identical text).
Optimizing cloud costs is a necessary but complicated process for businesses. For starters, you need to understand your business needs and how the cloud provider’s pricing model works. You also need to know your cloud service’s features and how they work. For example, if you want to use an Amazon S3 bucket for storing images or videos, then you need to know that the storage space on each server is limited by 5TB per month (and this limit does not apply if you pay more).
If your business uses many servers at once with high storage requirements, then it would be best if one of those servers was an SSD-based machine instead of spinning disks because these will require fewer resources when operating in terms of CPU clock cycles and IOPS performance as well as provide better latency due to their faster speed compared with HDDs (Hard Disk Drives).
Wrap Up
Optimizing cloud costs is a necessary but complicated process for businesses. We hope we were able to demystify the process and show you some easy ways to save money on your cloud bill.
