Cost optimization

Your organization has moved most of its systems to the cloud, but you're now seeing cost increases in areas you didn't expect. After some observation, you realize that you're inefficient across your environment, and you're still doing manual operational work.

In this unit, you learn about cost optimization and look at ways to reduce unnecessary expenses and improve operational efficiencies.

What is cost optimization?

Cost optimization is ensuring that the money your organization spends is being used to maximum effect. Cloud services provide computing as a utility. Technologies in the cloud are provided under a service model, to be consumed on demand. On-demand service offerings drive a fundamental change that directly affects planning, bookkeeping, and organizing.

When an organization decides to own infrastructure, it buys equipment that goes onto the balance sheet as assets. Because a capital investment was made, accountants categorize this transaction as a capital expense (CapEx). Over time, to account for the assets' limited useful lifespan, assets are depreciated or amortized.

Cloud services, on the other hand, are categorized as an operating expense (OpEx) because of their consumption model. Under this scheme, there's no asset to amortize. Instead, OpEx has a direct impact on net profit, taxable income, and the associated expenses on the balance sheet.

When an organization adopts a cloud platform, it must shift away from CapEx-oriented budgeting toward OpEx. This move reflects the shift from owning infrastructure to leasing solutions. Some organizations can derive value just from this new accounting model. For example, a startup company can attract investors by demonstrating a profitable idea at large scale, without needing a large investment up front to purchase infrastructure.

To optimize costs in your organization's architecture, you can use several principles.

Plan and estimate costs

For any cloud project, whether it's the development of a new application or the migration of an entire datacenter, it's important to get an estimate of your costs. This estimate involves identifying any current resources to move or redevelop, understanding business objectives that might affect sizing, and selecting the appropriate services for the project.

With the requirements identified, you can use cost-estimation tools to provide a more concise estimate of the resources that would be required. Transparency is important here, so that all stakeholders can review for accuracy and have visibility into the costs that are associated with the project.

Provision with optimization

Provisioning services that are optimized for cost from the outset can reduce your work effort in the future. For example, you should ensure that you're selecting the appropriate service level for your workload and take advantage of services that let you adjust the service level. You should also use discounts when they're available, such as reserved instances and bring-your-own-license offers.

Where possible, you want to move from IaaS to PaaS services. PaaS services typically cost less than IaaS, and they generally reduce your operational costs.

With PaaS services, you don't have to worry about patching or maintaining VMs, because the cloud provider typically handles those activities. Not all applications can be moved to PaaS, but with the cost savings that PaaS services provide, it's worth considering.

Use monitoring and analytics to gain cost insights

If you're not monitoring your spending, you don't know what you can save. Take advantage of cost-management tools and regularly review billing statements to better understand where money is being spent.

Take time to conduct regular cost reviews across services to understand if the expenditure is appropriate for the resource requirements of the workload. Adjust expenditures as necessary. Identify and track down any cost anomalies that might show up on billing statements or through alerts. If you notice a large spike in cost associated with network traffic, it might uncover both cost savings and potential technical issues.

Maximize efficiency of cloud spend

Efficiency is focused on identifying and eliminating unnecessary expenses within your environment. The cloud is a pay-as-you-go service, and avoidable expenses are typically the result of provisioning more capacity than your demand requires. Operational costs can also contribute to unnecessary or inefficient costs. These inefficient operational costs show up as wasted time and increased error. As you design your architecture, identify and eliminate waste across your environment.

Waste can show up in several ways. Let's look at a few examples:

• A virtual machine that's always 90 percent idle.
• Paying for a license included in a virtual machine when a license is already owned.
• Retaining infrequently accessed data on a storage medium optimized for frequent access.
• Manually repeating the build of a nonproduction environment.

In each of these cases, you're spending more money than you should. Each case presents an opportunity for cost reduction.

As you evaluate your cost, take the opportunity to optimize environments. Capacity demands can and will change over time, and many cloud services can manually or dynamically adjust the provisioned resources to meet the demands. These adjustments can drive the balance between a well-running application and the most cost-effective size.

Optimize your systems at every level. At the network level, ensure that data transfer is efficient and meets the expectations of your customers. Use services to cache data to increase application performance and reduce the transaction load on your data-storage services. Identify and decommission unused resources. Take advantage of lower-cost data-storage tiers to archive infrequently accessed data.