The Challenges and Our Solutions
Cloud computing is the backbone of modern businesses. With a wide variety of cloud platforms available, it’s easy to run apps and web services without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. However, as more and more businesses move their workloads to the cloud, they often face high operational costs.
Here are a few reasons:
Lack of visibility
The lack of an executive dashboard gives organizations no way to optimize, monitor, or organize any of the cloud activities and hence, costs.
A very simple example is the NAT costs. Sometimes we call our internal API using a public endpoint. The network traffic charges us very much.
Resolutions
We’ve deeply understood the cloud platform features and their hidden costs. That is the reason why we can suggest the best solution to minimize that amount.
Learn more about our Cloud Consulting & Development.
Improper provisioning
Provisioning refers to the allocation and management of cloud resources by the cloud provider to its customers. A cloud application development company should be able to anticipate how many resources it will require.
Failure to do this leads to unnecessary cloud costs and inefficiencies. In the case of under-provisioning, the effect is visible in terms of low performance and high latency of jobs, which leads to poor user experience.
In the case of over-provisioning, clusters are flooded with servers and several cloud resources remain idle. The cloud resource user will be forced to pay for these unused resources anyway leading to unnecessary costs.
Resolutions
We’ve analyzed carefully the system architecture and propose the best configuration to make sure:
- Resources are allocated properly
- Have a flexible scaling solution to make sure the core business can work continuously for the maximum designed capacity.
Learn more about our Microsoft Azure Development, Google Cloud Platform Development and AWS Amazon Web Services Development.
Poor application architecture design
While developing a cloud application, few software architects have the knowledge of designing and building a cloud application architecture.
Furthermore, they rarely take the pain of taking into account the costs associated with specific application features. For example, the cost of a certain query for a widget installed in a web application may cost thousands of dollars.
This lack of skills and experience often leads to applications that are poorly designed for cloud-based platforms, thus failing to deliver the true value of the cloud platform.
Resolutions
This is the key reason for an inefficient-high-costs cloud-based system.
Unfortunately, this is the hardest point to be fixed.
If the system is designed by HDWEBSOFT, it’s easy because we will make sure that things never happen.
But if it’s a legacy system, we will step by step learn from its pains and step-by-step resolve the issues to make sure we can save a competent amount without a long downtime period.
Lack of accountability
With the absence of individual login credentials, any user can log in to the cloud platform at any time and may add/delete/modify operations.
Due to this nature of anonymity, it is very difficult to figure out who modified what and when. This has direct security and cost implications for the company.
For example, a malicious insider may attempt to transfer a sensitive file/data to someone outside the cloud via email or a pen drive.
If the cloud administrator is not well-equipped to know when, where, how, and what was being leaked, and by whom, it turns out to be a problematic process to investigate insider jobs.
Resolutions
Our solutions for this point are:
- Avoid owner/admin access as much as possible.
All the changes will be monitored and declared the needed information:
- Purpose: What does it do?
- Estimated costs: How much would it cost?
- Expiry: When it completed its duty?
Learn more about Cloud for MVP & Startups.
Inefficient Budget Forecasting
Most cloud platforms, like AWS, provide auto-scaling features to control cloud costs by adjusting capacity.
However, they find it difficult to forecast cloud costs when there are plans to introduce new services/apps, business demand for existing services changes, and when the software efficiency fluctuates on existing services.
Forecasting is complex, and it requires setting up processes and workflows, deep expertise, and the right data.
Resolutions
We can provide accurate cost estimation for static resources and pay-as-you-go resources with predictable by-the-time-being resource usage.
But auto-scaling is quite a hard story. We need to monitor the system for a few months to identify the resource usage statistics.
Learn more about how DevOps Services can help to optimize your IT Process.
Approach towards Policies and Methodologies
Misaligned approaches between your teams/departments are a hurdle that can make or break your cloud cost optimization efforts.
When each team or department tries to follow its own method for managing cloud resources and costs, the result is more focused on organizational change, rather than technology implementation.
This can be difficult and tricky to manage, especially if the teams are not on the same page in terms of cost optimization.
Resolutions
This is a hard story if the system is not managed and monitored by HDWEBSOFT.
But if HDWEBSOFT plays that role, we will have monitoring for the resource usage and billing forecast to find the abnormal behavior, announce the bad practice and force the team to follow the process.
Our Cloud Costs Optimization Techniques
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For other case studies showing how HDWEBSOFT delivers measurable outcomes for engineering teams, see how we solved time zone challenges in offshore software development and built our practice around client trust as a growth engine.
For vendor-specific cost-optimization guidance, these official references complement the practices above: the AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization Pillar and the Microsoft Azure Cost Management documentation.