Although “keeping cloud costs down” may initially sound like clickbait, the reality behind this topic is actually important and has a genuine impact on businesses. In my experience, cloud expenditures aren’t just about picking the right provider, whether AWS, Azure, etc., but mainly about how a company manages its cloud provisioning and cleanup processes. Here are several practical strategies I’ve found that do help with this:
1. Simplify Deletion as Much as Provisioning
Companies often emphasise rapid and easy provisioning of cloud resources due to immediate demands from teams wanting resources quickly. Unfortunately, deleting resources is usually more complicated because of the perceived risks involved, especially the fear of mistakenly removing something crucial.
To address this:
- Implement a straightforward deletion process at the same administrative level as provisioning; you can script or develop ways of checking if dependent or downstream resources have been used.
- Introduce robust referential integrity checks to ensure resources are safe to delete.
- Provide easy access to clear logs, making it simple to identify inactive or underutilised resources.
2. Enable Easy Resource Resizing
There’s a common misconception that the cloud will automatically handle scaling seamlessly. While autoscaling can indeed work beautifully, it’s not always as straightforward as it sounds, especially when third-party managed services complicate the process. This can lead to operations teams over-provisioning initially to avoid the hassle of scaling later, inadvertently inflating costs.
Therefore:
- Create processes that simplify scaling resources without cumbersome workflows or downtime.
- Reduce the complexity and risk associated with resizing, helping operations teams feel confident in provisioning only what’s necessary initially.
3. Ensure Supporting Infrastructure is Cloud-Friendly
A hidden factor often overlooked is how cloud-friendly your supporting infrastructure actually is. Legacy networks, IP addressing schemes, and particularly firewall provisioning processes can significantly slow down cloud agility. If a firewall rule change takes weeks to approve and implement, teams become reluctant to make cost-saving adjustments such as shutting down unused test environments.
Recommended actions:
- Update your infrastructure and processes to match cloud agility standards, or at least highlight this as a risk and help them get budget to do so.
- Automate firewall and network provisioning where possible, reducing administrative bottlenecks.
For instance, test and development environments often don’t need to run continuously. By implementing scripts or automation to shut these down when unused, substantial savings can be realised, but only if the supporting infrastructure can accommodate these quick changes, such as keeping firewall routes open when the environments are spun back up with new IP addresses.
4. Align Cost Management with Technical Expertise
Often, the individuals responsible for managing cloud cost reports, like project managers or financial controllers, might not fully understand technical details or which resources represent genuine value or unnecessary overhead.
To mitigate this:
- Ensure cost breakdown reports are regularly reviewed by technical architects or senior subject matter experts alongside non-technical managers.
- Facilitate regular discussions between these roles to identify redundant or temporary resources, like those used in proofs of concept, that could be safely decommissioned.