Cloud Spending is a double-edged sword. We may end up spending more and finding it later or spending less impacting our services.
We have seen many of our customers struggle to manage cloud costs and have seen them either scaling down their cloud services or moving from one cloud service to another to cut costs.
The main issue is not the cloud service, but the education of cloud cost. The education to make sure that the cloud cost is understood by everyone in an organisation including the DevOps and Development team.
We teach and follow the following important principles in our inception
- Everyone takes ownership of their cloud usage – Everyone understands how to calculate what they spend when they use the cloud.
- Business Value is the King of Decision making – Any action taken for any new service utilised in Cloud must have a business value attached to it.
- Timely reporting and communication – All cloud spending are reported are available for the specific time we seek the report, not late. This makes sure that we see immediately what we spend.
- Take advantage of the variable cost model available in the cloud – e.g. Ephemeral virtual machine instances could be used for certain use cases which could bring down the cost to 90% compared to a dedicated one.
Cloud Management is an art, it must be perfected as we do and must be effective immediately than later. The key is not to curb cloud spending or sob that we think we have spent a lot after we have done the spending, but to make sure that we spend right.