Comprehensive Guide to Cloud Cost Optimization

The original premise of the public cloud was to provide a simple and cost-effective alternative to building, maintaining, and operating your own data center. But the reality is more complex, and ensuring your workloads continue to perform as expected at the lowest possible cost requires proactive attention. You have to consider thousands of configuration choices and then continually adjust as your workloads and cloud provider options change to maintain a real-time, best-fit infrastructure. This guide will help you understand what goes into cloud cost optimization, and how to control costs and maintain performance on an ongoing basis.

Cloud Optimization and Rightsizing

Minimizing costs, reducing risk, and maximizing business value—all at the same time—requires a delicate balancing act. It’s not a new challenge, nor is it unique to IT infrastructures. But when it comes to the cloud, especially in hybrid cloud scenarios, you need to understand the performance, risk/compliance, and cost impacts of your current resource allocations and then adjust to make optimal decisions that meet your SLA and budget targets. The following resources discuss the whys and hows of maintaining the right balance:

Cloud Cost Management

In the public cloud, you pay for what you use. Too often, we like to insert the word “only” in there—as in you only pay for what you use—but this creates a false sense of budgetary security. Because while that statement is true, so is this one: you have to pay for what you use. If you’re not paying attention, or if you’re not making the optimal choices, you could be on the hook for skyrocketing cloud bills. Here are some resources to help you keep your cloud costs in check:

Cloud Performance Monitoring and Management

When you migrate workloads to the cloud, you cede some control. That’s by design and it’s not inherently bad. It does, however, mean that you need to keep an eye on those deployments to make sure you’re getting the performance and benefits you expect. Plus, you need to watch it over time as things evolve. This includes both changes on your side—new or updated applications, increased demand, etc.—as well as new features from your cloud provider(s). Here are some resources to help you maintain expected performance levels in the cloud over time:

AWS and Azure Clouds

If your organization is using a public cloud, chances are you have workloads running in Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Azure, or even both. Here are some articles that provide information and guidance that are specific to AWS and/or Azure: