According to Gartner, organizations report
saving an average of 16% by moving to
public cloud, but higher cost reductions are
often possible.
Reducing Current Spend: Changing How
Services Are Consumed
One of the most obvious ways to reduce cloud spend is to
reduce the amount of resources you consume. This does
not mean sacrificing performance or capabilities, but rather,
to more closely match your consumption to your needs, so
that you are not paying for idle resources. The average uti-
lization rate for hardware in a data center is around 20% 4 ,
which means organizations are provisioning (and paying
for) copious amounts of unutilized overhead capacity. 5
Instead of letting this expensive habit follow you to the
cloud, change your organization’s behavior to take advan-
tage of the flexibility of the cloud, and rightsize your com-
pute instances to appropriate levels. You may have already
gone through a rightsizing exercise when you migrated, but
this is not a once-and-done activity. Set target minimum
and maximum utilization rates and continually monitor and
rightsize your environment without fear of needing to pro-
vision today for the next three or five years of use. As your
organization becomes more advanced, automated scaling
and provisioning strategies can also dramatically increase
infrastructure utilization rates, driving a more efficient
spend.
4
5
Twitter user @Deadprogrammer said it well: “The cloud is
not about paying for what you use, it is about paying for
what you forgot to turn off.” We therefore recommend reg-
ular scans of your environments to check for orphaned
instances and unused capacity. Despite your best efforts,
the freedom of the cloud will inevitably lead to some ser-
vices getting turned on and subsequently forgotten, while
they quietly add to your monthly bill. Our best practices
include checking for stopped compute instances, unat-
tached storage volumes, unused load balancers and NAT
gateways and to rotate your logs after their retention
period has expired.
Another common way to reduce cloud consumption and
thereby lower your cloud bill is to manage the uptime of
your environments more efficiently. This is one of the new
behaviors uniquely enabled by the cloud, which entails
spinning down lower environments when they are not being
actively used. When combined with automation, environ-
ments in the cloud can be provisioned and spun up within
minutes rather than the months it might take in an on-prem-
ises environment. This means you can deprovision idle
resources and avoid paying for them without negatively
impacting productivity when you need them again. To
implement this type of behavior, start by categorizing your
applications and environments based upon criteria such as
Amazon Web Services - Cloud Computing, Server Utilization, & the Environment, 2015
CIO Magazine - 2011 Virtualization: Bump Up Your Server Utilization for Big Enterprise IT Gains
36 | THE DOPPLER |
SUMMER 2019