What Your Cloud Provider Won't Tell You (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Rely on your provider for this and you will get rekt

hello frens, there can be many great benefits of cloud. However the single most overrated aspect is cost. The cloud providers will tell you that you can save money by migrating your workloads to cloud.

Cloud Cost Optimization

I have mentioned this before, but cloud providers are not always your friend when it comes to cost optimization. There are great cost structures with serverless and other services that can help reduce your bill. I have talked with multiple technology leaders at organizations that have undergone large scale migrations to the cloud. What I hear repeatedly is that the cloud provider does not help customers optimize their costs. Hopefully, some of my readers see this is because optimizing customer’s costs means less revenue for the cloud provider. Slight conflict of interest here. You need to constantly be bringing up with your solutions architects or professional services people if there is a way to optimize cost on the architecture, and investigate. Otherwise, the cloud provider does not have much of an incentive to optimize your costs as chances are you wouldn’t notice. It is best to have some people looking at costs and determining where there is an opportunity to reduce costs. Classic things like unused EC2s or EBS volumes come up very often.

There are orgs that were cloud native from inception like Instagram or Uber, and that is great. This advice still remains true that you need internal teams focused on optimizing costs.

Automation Jobs for Cost Optimization

One of the best ways to get some of the low hanging fruit in idle resources is through automation jobs to identify idle resources. Many times people just forget about things they created and dont take action to terminate unused resources after a test is complete.

One possible solution is to leverage automation to search for idle or unused things. One automation job my firm has in place is to email the owner of EC2 instances that have not been turned on in 60 days, and suggest deleting said instance. As well as any attached EBS volumes.

Another easy solution is to set up a Lambda function to turn off all lower environment infrastructure like RDS or EC2s over the weekend and turn them back on Monday morning. Temporal rules in Eventbridge or SNS should get the job done for triggering the Lambda.

Conclusion

Short and sweet free article today. Remember cloud providers are not your friend when it comes to cost optimization, you need to take the initiative and make it a priority.

-Celt