Cost Optimization Tops the List of Cloud Initiatives For Enterprises

With “Moving more workloads to cloud” a close second, optimizing for cost is more important than ever! It should be part of your cloud optimization strategy. The impact of unutilized and underutilized cloud resources hits more than just the bottom line.

“There’s a corresponding opportunity cost in overspending on cloud and it’s in foregoing having more budget to invest in sales and marketing. Plain and simple, we could be doing something better for our business with that money.” CFO of a major online marketplace

There’s a moment when every organization on cloud realizes that their bill is not what they expected, I call this “bill shock”.

You can see these organizations presenting their journey to “cost recovery” at cloud conferences. If you haven’t experienced their pain yet, you will.

So what did they do about it and our your current efforts in this area up to scratch?

Step 1: “See” what’s happening in your cloud environment

Research done by one of the readily available reporting tools reveals the root cause of the bill shock is that organizations are not taking advantage of the promise of the cloud. That is, they aren’t paying only for what they use and what they need. Why is that?

This is because they aren’t managing their resources effectively. Even if you are willing to invest DevOps staff time to create and maintain custom scripts to stitch them together, the native cloud tools aren’t up to the task.

DevOps tools will identify:

• Application utilization and suggest the right size for instances.
• Cyclical and temporary workloads that could be scaled down or shut down entirely when not in use.
• Stranded resources like detached volumes, excess snapshots, old images, and artifacts from your pipeline process.

Once you can “see” the issues, you can take remedial action.

Step 2: Take action to eliminate the contributing factors

By automating cloud resource management based on policies and business rules. But how?

You could roll your own custom code with the native cloud tools and APIs. Many organizations have adopted this approach and live to regret it down the track. Over time, the cost of managing and maintaining this low-level code undermines the savings dividend they hoped to achieve. It also ties up staff that could be put to better purpose.

“I don’t want my very expensive DevOps resources writing low level code to turn stuff on/off or clean things up. I want them working on problems that are core to our business like accelerating the delivery of new features into production and integrating new ways of running our business with AI, ML and serverless.” CIO of a major financial services business

There has to be a better way to optimize cloud costs automatically other than monkeying around with custom code. There’s a GorillaStack for that!

At GorillaStack we offer the best of both worlds:

1. point and click automation for the drudge work of turning resources on/off and cleaning up the detritus of cloud
2. automating the remaining business-specific custom code and script execution with better visibility and management through our platform

Also see cloud cost optimization use cases.

Benefits of Reducing Cost as part of your Cloud Optimization Strategy

We’re experts on the APIs so you don’t have to be. We power your cloud optimization strategy to maximize results with minimum friction. We love to work with organizations’ DevOps teams and/or their consulting partners to help them become DevOps Heroes to the business!

The best part of it all is that the savings pay for the platform usage and can generate an ROI of 3x-20x. This is because we typically reduce the cloud spend by 20%-60%!

I particularly like how using the platform eliminated the bickering between Finance and Engineering about our cloud spend and allowed us to return their focus to our core business. – CEO of a major media company.

Take a test drive of GorillaStack or book a demo with us to discuss how you can optimize your cloud cost today!

Want to explore more ways to reduce your cloud billings? Check out 11 ways to reduce your AWS EC2 Costs and reduce your EBS costs.