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4 Reasons You Aren’t Saving in the Cloud

The verdict is in on cloud costs, and if you’re not optimizing your usage properly, it’s not looking good. RightScale (now Flexera) recently surveyed IT professionals and found that their top priority is cloud cost optimization. Flexera has measured cloud spend waste as high as 35%, which is higher than the 27% respondents reported, indicating that people underestimate the amount of waste. Nearly 40% of instance spend goes to VMs that are less than half utilized.

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Shannon Rush, Principal Cloud Architect, and Adam Gabor, Senior Principal & DevOps Practice Lead, discussed the state of spending in the cloud sector during one of Maven Wave’s booth sessions at Google Next ‘19.

“Previously, it was a big capital spend and then you had a fixed amount of compute that you might as well use as much as you possibly can, so driving utilization against your sum cost was really the #1 priority,” said Rush. “The cloud completely changes that around. Instead of having to worry about fixed upfront costs, the trick in the cloud is doing as good (of) a job as you can to match your actual consumption with your demand at every point in time.”

Rush and Gabor revealed four practical ways for enterprises to achieve this optimization and save more money in the cloud. Here’s a quick look at those four directives.

1. Design a scalable architecture

    • Optimize, don’t just lift and shift
    • Don’t buy for peak usage (“There’s no reason to buy today what you’re not going to use until tomorrow in the cloud,” Rush pointed out.) 
    • Leverage containers, Kubernetes and Google’s network flexibility

2. Cost governance and capacity planning

“IT departments have never really had to manage highly variable costs before,” Rush noted. “You’ve got to build those muscles.”

    • Add an organizational role for monitoring costs
    • Use folders and labels
    • Plan for spikes in usage

3. Optimize operations to track costs

    • Codify your cloud infrastructure
    • Create automated pipelines (“In the cloud, everything is a service so therefore, we can automate everything and there’s no reason we shouldn’t,” Gabor said.) 
    • Use dashboards to measure utilization

4. Create a modern, cost conscious culture

    • Hire automation experts
    • Use targeted training
    • Organize cross functional teams around product delivery (“One of the best things we can do in the cloud to help minimize costs is to organize cross-functional teams … [to] reduce those bottlenecks,” Gabor noted.) 

Interested in learning more? Watch the full video here:

Through its Infrastructure practice, Maven Wave provides full-service support options to assist clients at every phase of the cloud journey. The Infrastructure team helps with DevOps and hybrid and multi-cloud, as well as offering Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Managed ServicesContact us to learn more about our Infrastructure services.

July 11th, 2019
CLOUD & MOBILE APPS

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2019-11-12T10:19:46-06:00