Cloud makes industry-leading technology available to everyone at a comparable cost. And it actively gets cheaper the longer you plan to use it.
These commits give the bigger consumers more leverage over smaller players, but byte-for-byte it’s fair game. On top of that, everyone now has the ability to make global, world-class deliveries.
Simply put, Cloud gives us the scale to actively apply best practice to our solutions.
While managing your cloud spend can be a hassle, we’ve made a few observations over the years to keep in mind when considering your cloud costs.
3) Don’t Treat The Cloud As A Hardware Refresh
The cloud, in all it’s flexibility, is built on very smart design.
This means that it uses:
- Far better hardware than most businesses are able to afford;
- A highly superior network and infrastructure;
- Orchestration/engineering expertise that are superior to most organizational capabilities.
For this reason, going from on-premise to cloud is not a like-for-like scenario. You really do not need to make everything the same and replicate your existing setup.
Know your baselines, monitor your workloads and adjust.
Especially if you are using the cloud to run virtual machines. They run a bill up the quickest in any of the Hyperscalers.
2) Modernise Your Solutions In The Cloud
The most common first step to cloud is a migration.
Bear in mind the first tip! If you are going to migrate to the cloud with your current technology stack, be sure to right size it.
But don’t just leave it there! Modernise.
Every hyperscaler has cloud-native solutions for everything you might need. These are full consumption-based services which are often fully managed by the hyperscaler themselves. This means that internal teams manage your code and the customer/user integration.
By all means, use the cloud to spare yourself a capex-intensive hardware refresh and reduce your risk with aging hardware. But the very next step should be modernising your applications and technology stack.
1) Use Hyperscaler-Native Solutions
Every hardware vendor will be pushing for you to use virtual appliances in the cloud.
The Hyperscalers have even accommodated them with a marketplace to push these solutions.
The drawback is that, often, these solutions are built on the compute mechanisms offered by a Hyperscaler. So they are VMs, which we have established is the most expensive way to consume services in the cloud.
Furthermore, the way the bigger hyperscalers are architected means that you don’t have all the access to the hypervisor you might need. Which is helpful in on-premise virtual appliance deployments. This means that you often have to modify the way your VPC works to accommodate these appliances.
I acknowledge that there are very real features from hardware vendors that might not exist in the cloud. And in those scenarios, by all means, use them, but if you are looking for a load balancer or a firewall, compare your chosen Hyperscaler solution to your preferred OEM and see if, feature for feature, the Hyperscaler solution meets the brief.
If it does, you will save a bucket on licensing and engineering complexity.
Prioritise & Perfect Your Cloud Costs
It’s important to note that the Hyperscalers building out and making these facilities available to us do not do this for love and charity. Sure, they are promising you the unlimited.
But they do so without assuming your ability to pay for it.
The onus is on the consumer to make sure that they build their solutions in such a way that the costs are absorbent.
You are responsible for your cloud bill.
Want to know more about Cloud Migration? Click Here.
Or! If you’re ready to take the next step towards digital transformation, let this bring you closer.
