Most of the time the organizations focus on stability and performance to have a smooth and efficient cloud environment as each breakdown can seriously harm your company’s trust, and your primary obligation is to ensure that this never happens.
But in this whole process, the companies overlook the cost factor. More importantly, how can you get all three of these critical components—stability, performance, and cost efficiency—at the same time? Let’s take a look at this.
There are many different factors that come into play when you’re designing a storage solution. Each of these factors is important and should be given due consideration, and engineers while developing a stable and healthy performance-driven environment are forced to overlook the financial perspective by ignoring the cost of the additional capacity they’ll need with dynamic provisioning. While this might not be harmful when you have the budget ready for such investments, the same may prove to be very costly in case you are working on a tight budget.
In this post, we will discuss why you should treat your expenses equally, what makes over-provisioning storage so expensive, whether it is possible to skip the over-provisioning part and how we can save costs while doing it.
Why is it important to focus on the cost aspect equally?
Well, here are some shocking statistics that show the importance of managing code and cost equally. According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report:
- Respondents stated that their public cloud spending was 13% above budget on average, and it is expected to rise by 29% in the next 12 months.
- It is reported that their firms squander 32% of their cloud spending, up from 30% last year.
- More than 59% of firms still focus on optimizing existing cloud usage rather than migrating workloads that can save extra costs.
Therefore, cost management is also an integral facet and should be reflected upon. Enterprises must make strategic decisions regarding cloud computing, efficient tooling, cloud migration, along with cost management to remain competitive and exploit possible benefits.
Factors that can affect cloud costs?
Since cloud computing tends to involve automated processes, engineers need to plan ahead when outfitting their infrastructure. To avoid the complications that come with running out of disk space, they must over-provision storage to ensure there is enough room for storage in the future and allow themselves leeway to make manual adjustments resulting from unexpected increases or decreases in scale or usage.
As engineers, we are often tasked with provisioning storage volumes for our applications. This can be a daunting and time-consuming process, but it is crucial for ensuring the high performance of our applications. In most cases, it is best to over-provision storage volumes to avoid any potential issues.
But there are risks to over-provisioning. You may have to spend more money in the long run, and you could waste resources if your operation doesn’t grow as quickly as you expected.
How can you manage without over-provisioning?
If you want to focus on stability and performance while avoiding over-provisioning, you’ll need to build robots that monitor clouds 24 hours a day, seven days a week to make the appropriate modifications because people can’t commit this much time.
Human error will still be an issue even if humans are able to foresee and monitor cloud settings using the most advanced storage management tools and best-in-class backup facilities.
However, as you are aware, anticipating storage requirements in dynamic cloud settings is practically difficult. New goods and services, enlisting new users and increased customer usage can all have an effect on the amount of storage you require.
A New Angle: Performance Based Insights
Instead of reactive cost saving measures it should be proactive i.e getting performance insights while you are working on a new feature instead of once it is actually in production. What this means in practice is monitoring the resource utilization during development would help you a lot in selecting what should be the accurate instance type for running that service and you are not over provisioning and then rightsizing it to a smaller instance, since you will be wasting money between that period. Few tips to get these performance based insights:
- Use APM tools like prometheus, datadog in your dev environment so your developers can get performance feedback and can optimize their code accordingly.
- Use query monitoring tools like pgbadger for getting performance metrics on the queries you are running on RDS, the last thing you want is your unoptimized queries increasing your IO costs and making your cloud bill even bigger.
- If you use terraform, you can use open source tools to get a cost estimate of the infrastructure you are going to provision, which can give you an idea of how much you want to optimize it or even if it is economically feasible or not.
- Use load testing tools like jmeter or locust to see how load/cost effective your code is, getting caught with an increased cloud bill just because your code couldn’t handle the load it should have and it spun up 10 more auto scaling EC2 instances.
Let us help you!
Cost-Saving Insights(CSI), a new feature of OpsLyft that acts as a solution for infrastructure monitoring, works by analyzing all the resources to determine which ones are being used and which ones aren’t. This ensures that users maximize their use of each resource in the most efficient way possible while increasing server uptime.
It improves visibility on excess and underutilized resources that can help you monitor and manage cloud costs over the long run when your cloud invoices are long, complicated, and difficult to interpret.
If you are struggling with any of the cloud problems we’ve discussed above, schedule a demo now and we would love to show you the solutions we have built to handle the same for you. We will give you a complete walkthrough of it and tell you more about how it can benefit your organization.
Feel free to contact us for other DevOps-related queries at contact@opslyft.com
We are hopeful that we maintain our rate of innovation, brainstorm with a lot of developers and engineers and keep delivering the latest features of our product to you. See you soon!