Cloud has introduced a new paradigm to IT,
and requires new ways of thinking at all levels.
PaaS vs. IaaS: Serverless:
Often the easiest and fastest way to migrate your portfolio
to the cloud is to utilize a lift-and-shift approach which
involves rehosting your workloads on cloud infrastructure
(IaaS). However, this may not be the most cost-effective
solution in the long run. For applications which are appro-
priately decoupled, replatforming to utilize PaaS services
removes some of the burden of management, which can
lead to lower operating complexity and lower operating
costs. Implementing serverless architectures can help organiza-
tions further reduce their cloud spend. Compute costs are
typically the largest contributor to your cloud bill and pri-
marily come from the use of VM instances. While these are
billed on their per-second uptime, they are not typically
100% utilized. Serverless services are billed at the
per-100-millisecond rate, and only persist for the length of
time required to complete their function. A serverless appli-
cation can sit idle for free and only incur expenses for the
few milliseconds that it is needed, potentially resulting in
drastic savings. As an added bonus, the serverless AWS
Lambda service and Azure Functions service each offer
1,000,000 free requests per month and up to 400,000
GB's of free compute time!
Intelligent Storage Selection:
Storage options in the cloud go far beyond what is available
in the average on-premises data center. Your organization
may have started off by moving everything to Amazon S3
or Azure Premium Storage, but there are dozens, if not hun-
dreds, of storage options and configurations available.
Some may not only better meet your requirements but
could also ultimately be cheaper to operate. Taking advan-
tage of cold storage for your archives, only using premium
storage for production environments, choosing the appro-
priate replication levels and setting lifecycle rules for data
retention can all help reduce your monthly costs.
Cloud has introduced a new paradigm to IT, and requires
new ways of thinking at all levels. Achieving the cost reduc-
tions you expect from your cloud program will not happen
automatically. Your organization must adapt its behaviors
and processes. Following these best practices will start you
on your journey to optimizing your costs, and, through con-
tinual application, these practices will keep your cloud bill in
check.
Continuously monitor, manage and optimize
costs in the cloud with our Continuous Cost
Control managed solution.
Learn more at cloudtp.com/managed-cost-controls
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