Cloud Cost Optimisation and saving on DevOps in 2021

DevOps 2021: Optimise your DevOps cost and Cloud spend

Introduction

As companies are moving towards cloud technology in integration with DevOps, they are getting huge benefits out of it. But a serious problem occurs when implementing the latest tools and strategies turns into spending a massive amount of money. Cross-cutting is the only way that companies focus on while maintaining their quality. Companies are now emphasizing the methods that help them to reduce unnecessary costs and optimize cloud spend.

But what is the way that companies get to know their actual expenditure in advance so that they can control and optimize in the first place? Also, the DevOps team could not have the actual visibility of how their decision is impacting the cloud costs. So the main goal is to implement the DevOps strategies that can optimize the cloud costs.

Ways to reduce DevOps costs

Every public cloud provider wants to reduce their costs thus wants to focus on implementing DevOps strategies that blend well in the environment. But public clouds are not completely cost-effective. But considering the below points you can somehow reduce the DevOps costs.

* Automate scaling

A business goes through many peaks and troughs concerning coming requests. Such a situation like online biggest sales when a request to particular sites rises and may lead to disrupting the working of an application. You must prepare your application for these peaks otherwise the invested money and resources will get wasted. By automating the scaling will enable the application to add servers whenever they are required and turning extra servers when they are not required.

* Avoid unnecessary VMs usage

Public clouds offer pay per use service that helps IT companies to manage their unnecessary requests. But there can be a cost issue when you do not manage your VMs, an overrun can result in high cost. It is important to identify the duration when you can shut off the VM without impacting the production backup. It is not always necessary to keep your staging environment up and running. So it is a better approach to turn off the unwanted resources saving the costs.

* Manage Cloud sprawl

The way you control your Devops toolchain, the cloud usage also needs to be controlled by DevOps. Cloud sprawling can lead to massive costs due to unmanaged VMs and cloud instances. This can be managed if you place a well-implemented strategy to outline the number of VMs that falls into the budget. A proper check and balance can manage the cloud sprawl cost.

* Protect against security gaps

A company must enforce their security policies so there can be no flaws left at both users as well as employee end. Your complete system will be vulnerable if any of the flaws will get exposed and can be easily accessible by hackers for breach. This will lead to more cost and investment for security and recovering from the impact.

* Developing applications in containers

With the help of containers, you can easily host your applications and this will increase team collaboration. This will reduce the cost of the resources to run the enterprise. Also, containers help create a simple software update process without impacting the service. Containers allow the DevOps team to choose any programming environment to run their application.

Cloud Cost Optimization: What it means?

Cloud cost optimization is the method that helps you to reduce the overall cloud cost by identifying the mismanaged resources, selecting the right computing services, and eliminating waste. Optimizing cloud spend means that the developers and the DevOps team should have the visibility of how their decision is impacting the costs. So that they can make cost-effective decisions for the organization without impacting the pace of the automation process.

But if you are using the cloud then you might be aware of the fact that the cloud offers pay per request to lower IT costs. But some of the services charge for the complete resources whether they are used by the company or not which results in wasted resources. Once the cost is optimized then you can easily spend that cost on some meaningful tasks like building new applications.

Cloud Cost Optimization Techniques- The Best Practices

Below are some strategies that you can implement within your organization to cut down on the bill and save money by eliminating unused resources.

♥ Identifying the unused resources
It is important to identify the unused resources from your end. There might be cases when an administrator signs up for some temporary server to compute data and then forgets to turn it off. This will lead to unnecessary AWS bills. This is a common mistake that goes around companies and leaves the resources wasted.

♥ Utilize heatmaps
Heatmaps are a common and important technique that is used for optimizing the cloud cost. A heatmap is a visual tool that displays peaks and valleys in computing demand. Developers and administrators can use this information to manage the start and stop features for cost optimization. It helps you to find servers that may not be required at weekends and you can turn it off to save cost.

♥ Take advantages of spot instances
Spot instances can help you to save AWS spend and are available to be purchased for immediate use. Spot instances are suitable for particular computing cases like batch jobs which can be terminated quickly. Such jobs are common in almost every company so spot instance should be a part of all cloud cost optimization strategies.

♥ Minimize the data transfer cost
You can minimize the cost by making sure that the object storage and the compute services fall in the same region. This is because the data transfer is free in the same region. You can reduce the API cost by using batch objects instead of a large number of small files.

♥ Opt for Serverless computing
You can also choose serverless computing options like AWS lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud functions or even open osurce options like OpenFaas etc. It allows developers to configure the cloud instances which will save a lot of time and also operational expenses.

♥ Purge or migrate unwanted files and data after certain period
You can configure rules for data deletion or migration between different types of storage. This drastically reduces the long-term storage costs. All the major cloud vendors have the feature of Lifecycle Management.

♥ Using auto-scaling to reduce costs during non-peak hours
Most of the applications have varying traffic and loads during their peak and non-peak hours, maybe during a day or a week. So identifying this pattern of high peak hours and using autoscaling your resources and then again scaling them down during non-peak hours, can also save a lot on your cloud cost.Also turning-off your unused instances when not needed, can significantly lower your monthly cloud bill.

♥ Compress your Data before Storage
Compressing your data also reduces your storage requirements, thereby reducing the cost of storage.There are many data compression tools available in the market that you can use to squeeze your data into the cloud storage, hence reducing your storage costs.

Conclusion

We all agree with the fact that Cloud computing and Devops are future technologies and hold great potential.However over a period of time, the money invested in these technologies starts to grow exponentially and shows in your monthly bills. This is when organizations start feeling if implementing Devops or moving to Cloud  was a bad financial decision for them. However if you follow the above mentioned points during your Devops and Cloud implementation, definitely you can streamline your expenses and also cut-off on a lot if unwanted spend on unused instances, storage,data transfer etc.

So the promise of saving money using the Cloud can be achieved, as long as detailed attention is paid to Cloud Cost Optimization during the planing and implementation phases.