Cost Reduction in Cloud Computing Best Practices
According to Gartner’s analysis, AWS accounts for 47.8% of the IaaS public cloud services market share in 2018.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps you move faster, give access to services including database, analytics, storage, applications, and deployment, etc. are lesser IT costs.
Customers have been attracted to AWS for a wide range of reasons, such as the ability to start small and grow as needed, its payment models such as ‘pay-as-you-go, on-demand, and reservation’, and increased collaboration between employees, and changes the workflow of small businesses and large enterprises to help them make better decisions while decreasing costs. This allows businesses to obtain the best return of their investment for each specific use case.
Big companies like Netflix, Alibaba, ESPN, and BBC, etc. are already AWS services. The significance of the cloud is rising every passing day.
Gartner forecasts that the cloud services market will grow 17.3% in 2019 ($206.2 billion) and by 2022, 90% of organizations will be using cloud services.
Changes in Prices Over Time
Amazon has lowered its cost of using platforms 67 times since its launch.
Over the last decade, the AWS model is reshaping across two dynamics – AWS sourcing and cost management. The competitive pressure and drop in revenue growth rate is causing AWS to demonstrate more flexibility at the negotiation table as well as to make changes to its enterprise pricing/discount and support programs.
Introducing new services and continuous change in prices of the services, and pricing schemes have made it difficult for customers to predict the cost of the overall process. The more rapidly the price changes, the more challenging it gets for customers to predict the cost. AWS might have been reducing its cost since the launch, this doesn’t mean you won’t end up paying less. No matter how many times they reduce their price, migrating to AWS may cost you a fortune.
AWS can cost more than customers’ expectation. The prices can go high for more hosting of technical infrastructure as well as business related reasons. The pricing model of AWS is complex. It might be difficult for you to understand your bills unless you’ve thorough understanding of every aspect relevant to the application and its deployment environment. So if you don’t have understanding of every operational facet, it’s not possible for you to manage your expenses.
The unexpected rise in prices have encouraged some customers to re-consider their options and migrate to another cloud providers who offer accountability, simplicity, pricing transparency, and governance.
Solution
Before migrating your business to AWS, create a business plan and understand how much your cloud migration should save or how much you expect it to add to your cost. You can also create an economic model to find out how much you will spend on AWS across applications, services, and projects. You can use the AWS calculator to know how much AWS services will cost you so that you can accurately plan your budget.
The next thing you can do is to keep an eye on your invoice. Look out for a sign or red flag that might help you improve your underlying cloud infrastructure. For example, excessive data transfer costs may be a sign that you might need to reduce the amount of data transferred between regions. You can calculate your ec2, lambda, data transfer or s3 cloud cost to have a baseline.
Monitoring the infrastructure changes is not enough, you need to monitor the change in prices too. As AWS offers a pay-as-you-go approach for payment, you can always change your requirements as per the reduction in price. With the help of the AWS calculator, you can have an idea that how much it can cost you. Moreover, look out for the deals and discounts that can you obtain over the internet.