Tips to Optimize Cloud Infrastructure Costs Management

1. Tips to Optimize Cloud Infrastructure Costs Management Most organizations today host workloads in the cloud, but if you cannot keep cloud bills under control, this infrastructure model is not sustainable. Companies should therefore evaluate their cloud services fees before moving to the platform. Tips to optimize cloud infrastructure costs management Select Reserved or spot instances: Reserved instances are when organizations make an upfront commitment to using a certain amount of capacity over a one- to three-year period, thereby saving on cloud resources with reserved instances. In Spot instances, developers access unused capacity at discounted prices with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, Azure Spot VMs, Google Cloud Preemptible VMs, and Google Spot VMs. Plan capacity: Even though you can quickly scale cloud instances up or down, you have to still pay for unused capacity. Ensure that enough capacity is available to handle unexpected traffic spikes and load fluctuations, but not to a degree where you have to overspend on unnecessary resources. This is one of the mainstays of cloud infrastructure costs management Restrict fees for data transfer: Avoid unnecessary data transfers as cloud providers charge data egress fees to move data off their platforms or even between regions. This is a very expensive proposition. First, assess your cloud provider's transfer fees and then adjust your cloud architecture to reduce the number of data transfers.

2. Use tools to monitor costs: An effective cloud infrastructure costs management strategy can be worked out only with the right tools in place to monitor spending. For example, AWS offers the AWS Cost Explorer that analyzes your past spending and forecasts your cloud expenses for the next three months. It is to your benefit to have a cloud infrastructure costs management plan in place.