The cloud revolution is well and truly in full swing, with the growth in the utility and popularity of platforms like Azure and AWS. Despite its many use cases, it's essential to ensure that your cloud strategy is tailored such that you're deriving value from every dollar spent.

Given just how expensive cloud services are, cost optimization is non-negotiable. It ensures that the aptest and most cost-effective cloud resources are apportioned to each application or workload. It balances costs with security, performance, and compliance requirements to ensure that every dollar invested in cloud services serves organizational needs.

In every cloud deployment, the workload distribution is unique, with requirements that change over time. For cost optimization, it's essential to identify performance limits involving the workload based on operational measures and domain knowledge.

Cloud cost optimization requires automated tools and detailed analytics, as the cloud environment is so complex.

If you're looking for advice on the best cost-optimization cloud strategy, you've come to the right place.

This cloud cost optimization guide highlights some of the best practices:

Review billing and pricing information

Whichever cloud vendor you use, it's essential to stay in the know regarding the billing and pricing details of the service.

This information, essential as it is, can be used to note areas consuming high costs and optimize costs. You can analyze high-spend workloads and services and allocate costs to them in order of priority. That is to say, low-priority workflows shouldn't cost as much to run on the cloud as high-priority ones.

Knowing your cloud service costs and subsequent cost analysis can enable you to make better decisions to avoid paying for surplus cloud resources.

Set budgets

Another efficient cost optimization strategy is ensuring that every team member knows each project's budgets and goals. Instead of encouraging arbitrariness, ensure that every department, from production to engineering, understands the cost requirements for each process.

As such, it's ideal to set monthly budgets to help plan your cloud computing needs. Your needs may vary, depending on your organization's use, but effecting budgeting is essential either way to help you optimize costs.

Identify idle resources

More often than not, some resources are underutilized. This usually stems from overbudgeting for certain processes. For instance, a cloud computing instance may be underutilized to the point that it uses less than 5% of its CPU.

Note that with cloud services, you pay for the storage and computing power, rather than the space. In the instance highlighted above, it's clear that there's a case of significant waste.

In your bid to optimize costs, it's best to identify these idle instances and consolidate the workload into fewer cloud instances.

Use visual tools to assess system usage

It can be difficult to understand how much power the system uses without adequate visualization.

Heat maps are highly useful in cloud cost optimization. This infographic tool highlights computing demand and consumption's high and low points. This data can be useful in establishing stop and start times for cost reduction.

Visual tools like heat maps can help you identify clogged-up sections before they become problematic. When a system load becomes one-directional, you know it's time to adjust and balance it before it disrupts your processes.

Visual tools are often better than numerical metrics, as they're better presented. As such, your system administrators can make adjustments where necessary, as the visual tools are easily understandable.

Right-sizing

Right-sizing involves the analysis of computing services and the making of necessary adjustments or modifications to efficient capacity.

With several combinations to select, including criteria like graphics, storage capacity, throughput, database, memory, and more, it can be difficult to correctly size cloud instances.

Right-sizing tools can help you ensure you're using the right combination and not overpaying for services you don't need. Additionally, it can recommend alterations in instance families.

Right-sizing helps coax optimal performances from your cloud services, ensuring cost optimization.

Consider single-cloud vs. multi-cloud options

Multi-cloud solutions are popular for most organizations, as they offer more solutions and additional tools. However, many robust cloud infrastructures and architectures allow you to set up an all-purpose single-cloud solution.

As such, you can optimize costs by using the right single-cloud solution, as you'll only use and pay for resources that you use. A single-cloud solution can offer the same range of services as a multi-cloud option, provided it is adequately integrated to suit your need and packed with plenty of add-ons, customization features, and additional tools.

Consider cost optimization throughout the SDLC

The software development life cycle is often a lengthy and complex one, with considerations made for deployment, packaging, testing, and security in the delivery pipeline. However, little thought is often given to cost optimization.

This should not be the case, as cost optimization should be paramount throughout the process.

Planning stage

Your development team must ensure that the budget they project reflects their true need regarding the project. They can also use cost data to make better decisions regarding technical debt and the product's roadmap to be flexible with spending whenever the need arises.

Operation and deployment

Your software development team should be able to flag unpredicted expenditures and make adjustments during deployment speedily.

Design and build

At the design and build stage, the team should have all the information and data required to make cost-effective cloud infrastructure decisions, reporting on projected spending, and understand all cost implications.

Monitoring

Here, you can reassess the operating costs per feature, product, or team and make apt business reporting on ROI and expenditure.

Use real-time analytics

Team members with authorized access to data can make crucial, timely changes that affect the product's quality. With real-time analytics tools, they can identify cost-saving opportunities and take timely advantage.

Monitoring these real-time cost indicators is important, and you'll be able to identify abnormal operations that can cause unnecessary overspending quickly.

Conclusion

Cloud cost optimization is essential to ensure that you're making the best of what you're paying for. A third-party audit can help, as is adopting the practices highlighted in this article.

These practices help provide more transparency and give developers, engineers, and other members of your team access to relevant information to help them optimize costs.