Our 5 ways to reduce multicloud costs can deliver significant savings for users of multicloud environments. To achieve a cost reduction more efficiently, a cloud management platform giving you total visibility over your cloud accounts is recommended. This will eliminate the need to repeat each exercise for each cloud.
It is also worth noting our 5 ways to reduce multicloud costs are not exclusive to multicloud environments. If you deploy assets in a single cloud environment or a hybrid cloud environment, these tips will be equally as effective.
1. Terminate unused assets
Unused assets—often referred to as “zombie” assets—are those that were launched to serve a purpose but, for one reason or another, were not terminated when the purpose had been served. Most often, unused assets consist of idle EC2 and RDS instances (or their Azure/Google counterparts), empty Elastic Load Balancers, and unattached EBS volumes.
As well as terminating these unused assets, you need to look for containers that have not shut down. There are many reasons for containers not shutting down, but the most costly one is when a coding error has been copied from container to container during cloning. Cloud containers are individually less expensive than instances to run, but an error copied thousands of times over can be an expensive error.
2. Optimize remaining assets
Once your unused assets have been terminated, review the provisioning of your remaining assets. Often developers will launch instances with configurations that have worked for them in the past and consequently the instances may have more/less CPU, memory and storage than they need. This is where rightsizing is necessary.
Rather than manually checking every instance individually to ensure it is rightsized for optimal cost and performance, a cloud management platform will be able to provide you with the metrics you need to make accurate rightsizing decisions. In the case of CloudHealth´s cloud management platform, you can get recommendations across your multicloud environment.
3. Schedule start-stop times for NPIs
Running Non-Production Instances (NPIs) when access to them is not required is like leaving a light on when you leave the room, yet some users have difficulty remembering to switch them off. Scheduling scripts are one solution for this problem, but they are not as cost-effective or as flexible as scheduling software that can apply schedules to start and stop NPIs with the click of a mouse.
A typical schedule that starts NPIs at 8:00 a.m. and stops them at 8:00 p.m. Monday to Friday will save you just under 65% of the cost of deploying development, testing and staging instances in the cloud. You also have the option with CloudHealth´s multicloud management platform of permanently switching off NPIs and interrupting the schedule when access to one or more of the instances is required.
4. Put data in its right place
Amazon’s S3 storage service is the most profitable division of the entire Amazon company—and there is good reason for this. Most AWS users take advantage of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service because of its instant access, high scalability and guaranteed uptime. However, not enough users appear to take advantage of the Infrequent Access and Glacier storage classes.
Amazon actually offers two Infrequent Access storage classes—“Standard” Infrequent Access, in which data is stored in a minimum of three availability zones, and “One Zone” Infrequent Access, which is self-explanatory and around 20% less expensive. If you are storing data that is not necessary for disaster recovery, you can reduce multicloud costs by transferring non-archive data to the “One Zone” class.
5. Automate! Automate! Automate!
The four ways to reduce multicloud costs listed above almost fully maximize savings, but not quite. There is one more area that can be saved—your time. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, a cloud management platform giving you total visibility will eliminate the need to repeat the exercises for each cloud, once you set up the automation in each environment.
CloudHealth´s policy-driven automation feature is the closest you will come to hands-free management. You create policies for the platform to alert you to spending increases, underutilized resources, unattached volumes, etc., giving you more time to attend to business-critical events. multi cloud management could not be easier with CloudHealth, so contact us today to find out more.
