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Cloud Cost Optimisation: Proven Techniques and Success Strategies

April 3rd,2020

Cost optimisation is the continual process of analysis and refinement in reducing your cloud spend. No matter the stage or scale of a cloud project, the principles of cost optimisation apply and maximise results for businesses.

A comprehensive cost optimisation framework, built with analytics, tracking and instance orchestration tools, offers:

Reduced costs. A cost-aware architecture that meets its business objectives will ultimately deliver the highest possible return on investment. Even single optimisations, such as AWS Reserved Instances (RIs) can save up to 75% on your ongoing spend.

Visibility of your cloud services. Cost optimisation tools offer greater accessibility of service-by-service performance, usage and cost data across time, so you can see the bigger picture and investigate the smallest of expenses.

Expenditure attribution. By matching your cloud expenses to projects, teams and revenue streams, you can better understand your spend and evaluate the success of your cloud project.

Simpler, more performant architectures. Cost optimisation involves the consolidation of your services into the most efficient and performant options offered by your cloud provider.

“A cost-optimized system will fully utilize all resources, achieve an outcome at the lowest possible price point, and meet your functional requirements.”

Quote: AWS Best Practices.

Best Practices

To drive down costs, take an ongoing approach to cost optimisation. As opposed to only optimising after completion of a project, an iterative approach accounts for changing factors in demand, service availability and your own business goals. Establish a process of analysis, budgeting and improvement to ensure you stay in a cost-optimised state. To maximise your savings, consider:

1. Removing and consolidating unused or unattached instances. These often accumulate when testing, migrating or closing services. Run a complete analysis of your instance-by-instance costs and usage metrics to identify services that can be closed without impact.

2. Right-sizing over-provisioned services. Cloud providers bill the full amount regardless of the actual usage. Reduce excessive instance sizes and migrate to more efficient families, matching supply and demand. Cost analytics tools can help identify wasteful service selections and lead you towards an optimal environment.

3. Taking advantage of alternative payment models with your cloud provider. You can accumulate significant long-term savings by committing to services. For example, AWS Reserved Instances or AWS Savings Plans reduce your cloud bill by up to 75% and 72% respectively

Riley’s Approach

Riley works closely with clients to actively reduce costs as projects architectures progress through the entire lifecycle.Our technical experts explore all possible optimisations and transform them into actionable cost-savings recommendations. This includes implementing our proprietary instance orchestration software, Insight.

As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) partner, we also track the latest service and pricing updates to keep your environment efficient and evergreen.

We encourage visibility and data-driven decision making. To help you gain insights into your environment, we can configure easy-to-use dashboards powered by automated software agents.

We take the responsibility of cost optimisation off your team, allowing you to focus on what your business does best.

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Start bringing your cloud costs under control with our free guide, with actionable tips on cost optimisation.

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Cloud Cost Optimisation: Proven Tactics to Minimise Cloud Expenditure

Download our free whitepaper with actionable tips on cost optimisation.