Why Most Companies Are Failing at Cloud Cost Management

Why Most Companies Are Failing at Cloud Cost Management?

As cloud storage becomes increasingly popular large numbers of businesses are shifting their data and resources to cloud-based servers. The days of in-house servers are past as cloud servers are gaining more popularity today. However, there are numerous companies that complain that instead of minimizing expenses there seems to be no discernible change in their cost of business operations. This is where effective cloud cost management tips come handy.

Today, as businesses aim for higher workload scalability they are swiftly shifting their apps and database to cloud servers. However, the successful migration of data and apps to cloud servers is only the start. Essentially, businesses mostly get satisfied after shifting to cloud servers despite the increased storage costs due to improper cloud cost management.

Hence, our experts came together and found the reasons why most companies fail at cloud cost management and derived tips for effective and better cloud cost management.

Reasons Companies Find Cloud Cost Management Difficult

Thanks to the incredible computing power and secure storage, increasing numbers of companies are shifting their web services and apps to cloud-based servers all over the world. Normally, companies tend to set a specific budget for cloud services. Their resources are pre-assigned to ensure optimal cloud usage too. Despite this, there are many companies who complain about increased operational costs.

Here, we take a look at the major reasons that companies find increased operating costs after shifting to cloud-based servers:

1 – Inflexibility

AWS provides auto-scaling that lets you scale any system automatically and meet the increasing demands. However, apps and services that need a longer time to boot up may not scale according to the changing business needs.

2 – Sub Par IT Infrastructure

Often, in a bid to migrate faster to cloud computing and storage, business organizations tend to choose sub-par IT architecture. This causes inefficient workload performance and increased AWS cloud cost management.

3 – Predicting Complications

Predicting the budget for new services or completing the changing demand for currently-used services is complex, which often causes inaccurate budgeting and fault in costing.

4 – Geographical Price Variation

The plans for AWS cloud services depend on the specific region where the storage server is physically located. In case you do not pay attention while selecting the server location as per your business requirement it can result in increased expenditure for cloud server services.

Why Most Companies are Failing at Cloud Cost Management - Geographical Price Variation

Why Most Companies are Failing at Cloud Cost Management – Geographical Price Variation

5 – Less Use for EC2 Instances

Check to see if your EC2 instance is sitting idle or being utilized less than it should be. It is important to identify such instances and make sure you do not have to pay unnecessarily. In addition, it is important to ensure that your EC21 instances are shifted to the most updated version too.

How Companies Excel at Cloud Cost Management

If you’ve migrated to cloud storage but still feel that the cost of cloud services has only increased your spending instead of decreasing it, then there are certain aspects that need to be analyzed. Although AWS cloud services are aimed at increasing efficiency and decreasing server storage and computing costs, companies fail to get the
advantage due to several other reasons.

Let’s check out the top ways that you too can save on cloud cost management efficiently:

1 – Select the right AWS Managed Services

A certified managed service will get you professional help all along the way. With access to super-fast cloud computing technology, the transition from conventional servers to cloud servers will not only be quicker but also cost-efficient at the same time.

2 – Keep unused AWS services shut

Instances not currently in use are the only burden on your cloud budget. You will need to ensure that idle instances are shut down to avoid unnecessary billing and to prevent affecting the configuration of your current cloud architecture.

3 – Choose the correct storage class

AWS provides the Amazon S3 storage through 5 different price plans. The five plans are divided according to their storage amount, data volumes, HTTP GET requests, etc. Different types of storage have different costs depending on the above-mentioned factors. Hence, choose the storage amount which your business needs and avoid paying unnecessary expenses for additional storage and computing power.

4 – Select the appropriate type of instance

Choose the instance families that are according to your application work requirements. When you know how much memory you require for running your services, you can easily and effectively minimize the cost of cloud services.

Following the above tips for cutting down on excess cloud cost management. Choose the AWS cloud services according to your specific requirements and avoid paying for unwanted and unneeded cloud services.

cloud cost optimization strategies

aws cost reduction strategies

AWS Cost Reduction Strategies

3 Best AWS Cost Reduction Strategies to Keep in Mind

Business organizations are today seemingly spending excessive amounts of money on storage and computing services. This is especially true for those companies that are looking to expand their computing and storage capacities to deal with growing requirements. This is where Amazon Web Services AWS cost reduction strategies can work wonders to save on such expenses.

When businesses choose to migrate to cloud services providers, such as AWS, it allows businesses to increase efficiency to combat the growing workload and at the same time to reduce the overall cost of business operations. There are significant advantages of choosing ultra-modern pay-as-you-go hardware services as compared to those services which require you to pay a set amount up-front.

Basic Steps before Cost Reduction

Before you act on reducing costs, you need to determine the exact expense that the current AWS services are costing you. With the help of the AWS Free Tier service, you can explore and use the AWS services for a free trial period. This way, you can determine the specific AWS services which are useful to you and remove the ones that are costing you unnecessarily.

AWS Cost Reduction Strategies - Basic steps

AWS Cost Reduction Strategies – Basic steps

The next step is to use the AWS Cost Explorer to monitor and analyze your overall AWS service usage and cost. This is an excellent tool to visualize cost and usage at resource levels (EC2 Instance ID, etc) or high level (AWS services, AWS accounts, etc). First, use the “Monthly costs by linked account report” feature to identify the top most-expensive accounts. Second, you will need to check the services which are contributing most towards expenses in these accounts using the “Monthly costs by service report”. You can tweak the hourly and resource level granularity and tags to fine-tune your search for the most expense-incurring services.

3 Best AWS Cost Reduction Strategies

Saving money is one of the oldest tricks in business to grow it. The same principle applies when using Amazon Web Services as well. It is important to have control over the cost of your AWS infrastructure and workload. Experts advise thinking above the basic pricing cuts when employing AWS services. There are numerous advantages when it comes to cost-cutting with AWS.

Let’s check out the best AWS cost reduction strategies:

1 – Remove Unwanted AWS Resources

It is important to shut down unused AWS services to cut down on operational costs. With the help of Elastic Beanstalk and AWS OpWorks developers can swiftly deploy and re-deploy applications without the hassle of the underlying infrastructure’s configuration.

AWS Cost Reduction Strategies - Remove unwanted AWS resources

AWS Cost Reduction Strategies – Remove unwanted AWS resources

When you use AWS CloudFormation to identify your infrastructure as code, it becomes easier for developers to create resource templates of your AWS resources. This allows developers to quickly build and rebuild your instances. This unique way of cloud computing ensures that the core concept of ephemeral workloads, which involves shutting down and deleting unused AWS apps, easier.

2 – Use the Right Storage Class

The Amazon S3 storage offers 5 tiers, and it is essential to know how and when to use the individual class to optimize costs. The cost for each tier is broken down into the actual storage amount, the number of HTTP PUT requests, the volume of data transferred and the number of HTTP GET requests.

Here’s a look at the different rates and requirements for the different Amazon S3 storage services:

  • Amazon S3 Standard – This tier is meant for general purpose and mostly used for accessing data and for various other similar cases. This is part of the AWS Free Usage Tier and gives users 5 GB of storage on Amazon S3, 2,000 PUT requests, 20,000 GET requests, and 15 GB of monthly data transfer.
  • Amazon S3 Standard – Infrequent Access (IA) – This tier is designed less-used data, and requires the same resilience as a standard storage class. However, the data from this tier can be accessed quickly when required. Although S3 – IA costs less than the standard S3, there is a charge of USD 0.01 per GB of data transfer.
  • Amazon S3 One Zone – Infrequent Access – This tier is similar to S3 – IA but is considerably less costly as the data is stored in a single availability zone with lower resilience. Hence, One-Zone IA is an excellent choice for secondary backup storage.
  • Amazon Glacier – This tier is meant for data that is retained for over 90 days, such as cold data or backup data. The glacier is as reliable as standard S3 however it requires more time for retrieving stored data, as much as 3 to 5 hours.

3 – Choose the Correct Instance Type

It is essential to use the most cost-effective instances as different instances cost varying amounts. Make sure to select the best-suited instances for your applications work.

To optimize spending–to-workload ratio, you can take into account the type of processing unit and memory volume required for minimizing your expenses.

Conclusion

Cutting back on your cloud computing services with the help of our AWS cost reduction strategies will not only boost productivity but also add to the bottom line.

aws fargate price reduction

AWS Fargate Price Reduction

What are the Advantages of AWS Fargate Price Reduction?

Amazon is much more than a simple online retail platform. According to estimates, today Amazon Web Services (AWS) assists over 2,000 government agencies as well as over 5,000 educational institutes. It is also one of the top 4 public cloud computing companies in the world.

Amazon is rightly known as one of the most prominent IT companies in the world. Increasing numbers of clients are joining up for AWS after learning the immense advantages that AWS holds for their businesses. More recently, with the announcement of the AWS fargate price reduction at the beginning of 2019, more and more clients are getting attracted towards the incredible services offered by Amazon.

AWS is focused on providing cloud computing services to all kinds of businesses from around the world. 

This article is meant to highlight the advantages that AWS gives to individual businesses so that you can make the decision to switch your business operations to AWS cloud computing. 

Advantages of AWS Fargate Price Reduction

As of January 2019, Amazon announced a remarkable price reduction for its AWS Fargate services. The company offered 20% off on vCPU and 65% for memory around the world where Amazon Web Services are provided. The Fargate computing engine is a part of the Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service). The Amazon Fargate is a computing engine which uses containers for its basic computing tasks. It is an on-demand container-driven service. 

Advantages of AWS Fargate Price Reduction

Advantages of AWS Fargate Price Reduction

There are numerous benefits and advantages of choosing Amazon’s Fargate computing engine, such as:

  • Removing the need to provide a pool of instances
  • Decreasing the requirement to manage a Docker daemon or orchestrating agent
  • Avoiding instances where you do not need to pay for unnecessary resources

Using Fargate computing solution from Amazon, many renowned companies have been able to cut down on their infrastructure costs, including charges otherwise incurred for cron jobs, batch jobs and similar on-and-off workloads. 

The AWS Fargate price reduction will help to save significantly for containerized web servers, API services and queuing consumers from organizations in the background. 

For example, if your current application EC2 instances get as high as 10% to 20% of CPU usage then you should decide on shifting your containers to AWS Fargate. 

Additional Advantages of AWS

Apart from the incredible price reduction that saves a remarkable amount of money for your website’s daily operations, there are certainly additional advantages that you get when you switch to AWS Fargate computing solution. Some of the top advantages of AWS Fargate are:

1 – Easy to Use

The AWS Management Console, which comes as the user interface when you sign up for Amazon Web Services, is incredibly user-friendly. You can access a large number of services and applications using this server interface. Hence, if you are looking for a stronger web hosting platform or a new platform to upload SaaS, or even for moving your existing website to a new platform, Amazon Web Services can be easily handled without any special technical know-how or skills. 

The AWS provides comparatively simple and well-documented web services APIs that can be used as access to the platform. This way, you do not need an on-site server anymore for your IT requirements. Basically, Amazon rents its IT infrastructure to you when you sign up. 

2 – Different Useful Tools

Although AWS Fargate is commonly classified as cloud storage and cloud computing service, it contains an immense array of tools relating to software, database, networking and mobile analytics, to name a few. 

All in all, AWS Fargate price reduction has made it a single-stop solution for all your computing and IT needs. There is a ready-to-use platform that adds efficiency and effectiveness to your website operations. It is also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform and its individual services can be rented by anyone who needs it. 

3 – Incredible Server Capacity

An immense, limitless bandwidth and secure email hosting services are the two most demanded requirements for a cloud server. You can be assured of all your hosting and computing being taken care of with the help of AWS Fargate price reduction. In addition, the service easily and seamlessly accommodates the expansion and growth of your IT requirements too. 

4 – Reliable Encryption and Security

A major advantage of choosing AWS Fargate is its incredibly strong security features. There is a huge risk of hacking for WordPress sites today however with the help of AWS you can rest assured your documents and data are completely secure with top-class encryption protection. 

Conclusion

So, if you want your website to run smoothly without the need of managing the IT end, then you should choose to switch over to Amazon Web Services and get complete advantage of the AWS Fargate price reduction offer. 

aws cost monitoring tools

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools

5 Best AWS Cost Monitoring Tools

In today’s on-demand cloud world, every enterprise wants to transform its business functionality to the cloud platform. Most of the enterprises have already begun using cloud-based services to simplify their business model. When it comes to utilization of cost, you must start using various tools that can cut down your monthly bill. AWS Cost Monitoring Tools listed below are recommended by the experts for businesses of all types.

Most enterprises don’t pay their attention to overall expenses for cloud-based services. However, by making the use of such services, enterprises can see great benefits. The tools are designed to cut down hundreds of bucks from your monthly cloud bill from the unused cloud services of which you are unaware. Let’s check out the popular AWS Cost Monitoring Tools and their benefits.

Related Article

AWS Cost Optimization

The Best AWS Cost Monitoring Tools

1. Claudia

If you don’t want to spend extra money on the management of cloud cost, then Claudia is the best solution for you. It is a free tool designed for enterprises that want to cut down extra money from unused and unwanted cloud services.

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools - claudia

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools – claudia

 

This software is designed to help enterprises analyze and optimize their cloud spends over various platforms within the enterprise. The same tool can be used on multiple AWS accounts with a simple configuration.

The software offers detailed analytics through various parameters such as services, accounts, pricing, users’ data, and much more. The best part about this tool is it can be used as an independent cost management tool to handle your AWS accounts.

 

2. Rackware

Rackware is a hybrid cloud cost management software designed for the enterprises of different sizes. The software is designed to manage the costs of various cloud services used by enterprises.

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools - Rackware

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools – Rackware

 

What makes this software so much popular in the market is it can be configured easily with any type of business environment such as physical, virtual, and cloud.

The tool is designed to reduce the total workloads of the enterprises while managing the cloud cost. Compared with the traditional IT solutions, this software reduces up to 50% of workloads and costs as well. With an easy interface and better compatibility, the Rackware is an ideal software for every enterprise.

 

3. Apptio

If simplicity is what you need, then Apptio is the best solution for your firm to manage cloud costs. Apptio software lets you easily have the full picture of your cloud environment to keep an eye on the overall spending of all the cloud services that you have opted for your enterprise.

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools - Apptio

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools – Apptio

 

The app allows you to have full access to all IT services and cloud services of your firm. The software lets you easily configure your existing system so that you can have the full picture of your firm and all the services to access on the front page.

Unlike the free tools, the Apptio Cost Monitoring tool is a little expensive, however, it is all worth as you will be provided with plenty of useful tools and features to streamline the cost management of the firm. Being a premium software, Apptio is suitable for big enterprises with multiple accounts to manage.

 

4. Cloud Squeeze

Cloud Squeeze is one of the most advanced and innovative cloud cost monitoring tools designed for enterprises of all sizes. The software is designed with the latest Artificial Intelligence technology that works automatically for you. The software keeps an eye on every single entry of your firm without the need for manual tasks.

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools - Cloudsqueeze

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools – Cloudsqueeze

@cloudsqueeze

This tool is an ideal choice for every AWS client who has opted for various AWS solutions for their businesses. The same tool provides advanced security to keep your data usage and other critical information secured.

The same tool lets you easily see the daily spend of the firm so that you can easily get to know about the changed pricing and other information. All the information will be sent to your email ID as per your preferences. You are allowed to make changes to the existing settings of this tool. Get useful information about this tool from below given link.

 

5. Cloud Forecast

Cloud Forecast is yet another popular AWS Cost Monitoring tool present in the market for AWS Clients. The tool is designed for enterprises to slice down the monthly bill by reducing the wasted usage of cloud services.

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools - Cloud Forecast

AWS Cost Monitoring Tools – Cloud Forecast

@cloudforecast

The best part about this tool is it also cuts down the unwanted and unused resources. The tool is designed by highly professional developers by utilizing the latest technologies. The tool generates daily reports by fetching various entries of the firm.

The team constantly monitors the data and wasted usage by the firm. They will suggest you to not use such resources so that you can save hundreds of bucks every month. Fortunately, the tool automatically sends reports and other information to email and slack for easy monitoring of various costs of the resources.

 

Conclusion:

Managing cloud computing usage is a tough task for a beginner firm as it requires a dedicated team. However, by making use of such cloud monitoring tools, the entire process becomes easier even for the non-technical firm.

If you are worried about the cost monitoring of AWS and other IT services, then you must explore the above-listed cost monitoring tools as they help you in many ways and also save you a lot in the long run.

aws cost monitoring

AWS Cost Monitoring

4 Best AWS Cost Monitoring Methods

Monitoring your total usage costs of the AWS cloud solutions is essential to keep things clutter-free so that you don’t have to pay additional charges for the services that you don’t use. AWS Cost Monitoring is crucial to reduce the overall costing of the cloud services that you have availed from the Amazon Web Services platform. In this article, we have enlisted the best ways to keep an eye on the AWS costs. 

Most AWS Clients are utilizing different methods to reduce the overall costing of different AWS services. However, they have to constantly monitor the unwanted sources which increase monthly bills. By cutting down such unwanted resources which are of no use, you can simply reduce the cost of AWS. Let’s see how you can keep an eye on AWS costs. 

AWS Cost Monitoring Proven Methods

  1. Make use of Cost Monitoring Apps 

Thankfully, we have a range of third-party tools and applications that help us monitor the overall cost of the different services and resources used by the enterprises. 

Most digital marketers do make use of such third-party applications to keep an eye on the overall spending. The tools are designed to work as per the user’s needs. The tools are also customization making it easier to set up the monitoring time with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly options. 

AWS Cost Monitoring - Make use of Cost Monitoring Apps

AWS Cost Monitoring – Make use of Cost Monitoring Apps

Cost Explorer is one of the most popular cost monitoring tools present in the market for professional users who want to monitor their cloud cost and overall spending on various services. The tool is highly advanced as it generates regular reports with detailed graphs and more. It’s a product of Amazon. 

  1. Better Organization 

The cost of the AWS is dependent upon the IT team who are using different services. Since most services have become automatic, it makes it easier for the team to monetize them and to keep an eye on their total usages. Gone are the days when organizations have to use traditional services that involve manual tasks. 

AWS Cost Monitoring - Best Organization

AWS Cost Monitoring – Best Organization

No matter whether you own a small enterprise or a big one, you have to utilize various resources and tools to reduce the cost of the AWS. Cloud formation is highly recommended for such enterprises to monitor AWS cost as all the data stores in a separate space. Initially, the cloud formation will ask for some manual handling and extra cost, but you will get positive results after a couple of months of its establishment. 

  1. Configure your total Budget 

If you run multiple AWS accounts in an organization, then you have to allot a specific budget for each account. By keeping separate budgets for all the resources and services, you can easily calculate overall costing for each service and resource that your organization is using. 

AWS Cost Monitoring - Configure your total budget

AWS Cost Monitoring – Configure your total budget

When you implement this with your organization, you can easily forecast the total cost and the much-needed resources for the organization. As a result, you will not be required unwanted services that add up more money to your AWS billing cycle. 

  1. Go for Reserved Instances

Did you know you can easily reduce AWS cost by purchasing the reserved instances? Yes, you can instantly cut down the cost of services by purchasing reserved instances as per your requirements. 

Most organizations purchase instances that are of no use. They pay for the standard instances or wrong type of instances for which they have to pay daily. 

AWS Cost Monitoring - Go for reserved instances

AWS Cost Monitoring – Go for reserved instances

Reserved Instances lets you utilize the resources before you buy them. You won’t have to pay for such resources and services until you start using them which is indeed a good idea of reducing cost. 

  1. Free-up Space

Most enterprises use to take regular back up of all the important data including the snapshots. The snapshots are useful to fetch useful information from the past. To prevent duplication of snapshots, you have to explore the storage space regularly and delete such snapshots which are of no use. 

You don’t have to keep the previously-stored snapshots still you keep them in the storage memory. Enterprises have to pay for the storage space every month. By doing so, you could save hundreds of dollars in the long run. 

Conclusion: 

AWS Cost Monitoring is an on-going process and you have to keep doing so regularly to reduce the cost of AWS. You must utilize all the resources and services to slice down the monthly bill. The above-listed methods are used by most enterprises who are worried about the AWS cost. Go through these methods and try to utilize them to save hundreds of dollars every month. 

aws cost optimization best practices

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

Just like Amazon’s Web Services, Microsoft too has its platform called Azure. It’s a platform that offers a variety of cloud-based solutions to the enterprises of different sizes. The platform lets you make use of your favorite web building tools and management tools to take your business to the next level. If you are wondering about how you can reduce the overall cloud costing, then you must follow the list of Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices now!

Microsoft is everyone’s favorite firm as they offer all types of services for computer users and web developers. The company is now focusing more on providing cloud solutions by expanding the Azure platform with more partners. 

New technologies attract all types of enterprises and the Azure platform offers all types of cloud-based solutions to these firms. We all know that cloud is cost-effective than the physical software or services and for the very same reason, most firms are searching for reliable partners to help them improve their businesses. You can save even more on the same by following the Best Practices for Azure. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices

  1. Keep an eye on the usages of Virtual Machines 

Virtual Machines are important to run a business. If you want to modernize your business, you must have to start using the different types of virtual machines which can help you and your business in many ways. 

Each Virtual Machine has its power of performing various tasks and provide limited storage space to save important data. When you opt for Azure’s Cloud Solutions, you can lessen up the use of such virtual machines. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Keep an eye on the usages of virtual machines

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Keep an eye on the usages of virtual machines

By reducing the size of the Virtual Machines, you can save direct money on their maintenance and purchase. Apart from this, with a limited number of resources, you can use the available virtual machines to their maximum capacity. 

  1. Get Significant Discounts with Instances 

We all use Azure Instances for different purposes. Did you know you can reserve Azure Instances to cut down the extra cost on their purchases? You can get impressive discounts on the reservation of Azure Instances. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Get significant discounts with instances

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Get significant discounts with instances

Currently, they have three different reservation plans to suit your requirements. If you go with the one-year reservation plan, you will get a 40-50% discount. The two-year reservation plan gets you up to 65% of the discount. The third unique plan is called spot pricing that lets you put up a bid for the pricing which can get you a discount of up to 90%. 

  1. Go Serverless 

Servers are indeed necessary for the businesses if you want to take make your business a complete web-based. What you can do here to go with the serverless medium. 

Azure has a special tool called Azure Functions. The Functions is a serverless solution to run the code for the applications and websites without having to be connected to the server. All it requires is the software code and that’s all. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Go serverless

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Go serverless

Serverless functions take each of the code from the software and run them as separate containers. The separate containers give more flexibility to the developers to monitor and scale up the applications. 

  1. Make use of Cold Storage 

Azure has a special storage feature called Azure Storage. The Azure Storage is highly used by the partner companies and new clients who want to have separate storage space for their new ventures. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Make use of cold storage

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Make use of cold storage

Interestingly, you will be provided with two different options- warm storage and cold storage to choose from. Since you are using the stored data in rare cases, you should go with the cold storage. Cold storage is there for rare usage of the data. On the other hand, warm storage is for regular data storing which costs you higher than the cold storage. 

  1. Seek help from the trusted cloud management platform 

To make the Azure Cost Optimization more effective to save you extra money, you must have to choose the reliable cloud management platform. The cloud management platform allows you to check the subscriptions of different services as well as storage platforms. 

By analyzing all the data, subscriptions, and services, the platform would suggest you cut down some unwanted services. The platform will give you some recommendations for the services that are must-have for the business. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices - Seek help from the trusted cloud management platform

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices – Seek help from the trusted cloud management platform

Always research well before you jump for a particular service to optimize the Azure Cloud Services. It is always a good idea to optimize the overall expenses for the services to support your business. 

The Bottom Line: 

Azure is a big hub with tons of services based on the cloud. No matter whether you run a small company or a big enterprise, you must have to utilize special technologies and platforms to transform your business digitally. 

Azure Cost Optimization Best Practices give you clear ideas about how you can utilize the need for your project that can eventually help you and your company to save thousands of dollars. 

azure compute cloud cost optimization