Cloud Spending Under the Microscope

Controlling costs, cutting waste

While cloud services bring organizations undeniable advantages, they often come with a notorious hazard: overspending.

Due largely to the cloud’s self-serve push-button simplicity, monthly costs can skyrocket with little awareness as to why or how. Cost optimization strategies are critical for helping companies better understand and control their monthly cloud bills and budgets. Strategies that produce immediate results include:

Identifying and removing orphaned resources
Orphaned or zombie cloud resources are those no longer linked to an active project or function. Without a formal cancelation, these resources keep compiling monthly charges. Organizations should remain on the lookout for:

Cloud resources tied to past development sandbox experiments
Virtual servers now sitting idle
Detached processes and/or storage volumes or persistent disks with no parent
Snapshots to disks that no longer exist (or older snapshots no longer needed)
Unused external IP addresses that may have once been attached to (or reserved for) a virtual instance

Turning off cloud resources during downtimes
Non-production resources—including those used for development, testing, and staging—often run 24/7/365. However, in most cases, they are only needed during normal working hours. Shutting down these resources when not in use can result in substantial immediate savings. Companies can even automate their turn-off schedules via command line, APIs, or cloud management software.

Right-sizing resources
Most cloud workloads today are overprovisioned. Developers focus on performance and stability and tend to pay little attention to cost efficiencies. In their quest to meet their development goals, they may stock up on unneeded storage capacity, storage performance, memory, network bandwidth, and more—all of which contribute to hefty cloud bills.

Looking long-term

By focusing on their people, processes, and culture, organizations can drive lasting changes that improve cloud cost management. Examples include:

Seeking better organizational and executive buy-in about the importance of cloud cost optimization
Incentivizing cloud cost efficiency for development and business teams with cost targets for their workloads
Implementing a process earlier in the procurement/provisioning cycle that enforces a predefined cloud budget
Encouraging better cost-containment practices as part of a wider showback (making departments aware of how they are using IT resources) or chargeback (charging departments for usage) program
Using cloud resource tagging to help determine which resources belong to workloads, projects, teams, or business groups
Applying policies, rules, or scripts that could perform automated, ongoing resource checks for discrepancies and remove unattached resources after a process is no longer needed

In some cases, cloud cost optimization efforts may go beyond simply reducing dollar amounts. For example, IT and financial teams can better articulate the value of the cloud spend in relation to business objectives and/or make cloud expenses more attributable and predictable.

For the sixth consecutive year, enterprises have cited the need to optimize cloud spending as a top cloud initiative.

³Flexera’s State of the Cloud 2022 Survey
⁴Turbonomic’s ParkMyCloud blog