Are you taking a hard look at your cloud costs this budgeting season? Is your IT budget getting eaten up without a good ROI to show for it? Do you need to justify your cloud expenses and business cases to leadership?
At Data Summit 2024, Michael Agarwal, director and global practice leader, site reliability engineering, cloud and NoSQL databases, Datavail, discussed cloud cost optimization strategies, tips, and best practices during his session, “Cloud Cost Optimization: Strategies, Tips, & Best Practices.”
The annual Data Summit conference returned to Boston, May 8-9, 2024, with pre-conference workshops on May 7.
He discussed right-sizing cloud resources, monitoring, and managing your cloud usage effectively, identifying and eliminating wasteful spending, leveraging automation for better cost control, exploring cloud pricing models and modernization opportunities, and achieving the right balance of price and performance for your business requirements.
“Why do we want to optimize costs?” Agarwal said. “It’s going to help your company save money. If everyone in the world does cost optimization, you’re also helping our planet.”
The AWS cost infrastructure runs at an hourly usage rate, you pay for what you use and for what features you need, he explained.
“Before you can optimize, you have to understand how they are charging us,” Agarwal said.
If you’re using AWS, he recommends staying on top of your usage by enabling multiple billing alerts, analyzing trends and costs on a regular basis.
“You can do process automation on things that you don’t need,” he said. “All these companies have tools to help you understand [your costs].”
AWS also provides:
- Cost optimizer for Amazon Workspaces
- Instance scheduler on AWS
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
- AWS Compute Optimizer
The EC2/RDS pricing model offers reserved instances/savings plans that can provide up to 72% cost savings compared to on-demand instances.
Lifecycle policies on storage can help companies to purge what isn’t needed, he said. You can set the S3 bucket lifecycle policies for auto purge and archive. Then you can choose different S3 storage types such as reduced redundancy, infrequent access, standard, or Glacier.
“The difference is the speed,” Agarwal said. “Picking the right type will help you with your costs.”
Many Data Summit 2024 presentations are available for review at https://www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2024/Presentations.aspx.