MARCH 2021CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9Oh, for the Love of Transfer CostsPublic cloud is great until you need to move data around (which never happens, am I right??! - JK). The simple act of sending data around can cause significant transfer cost problems and ultimately cause one's bill to spike. Transfer cost areas to keep in mind and stay vigilant:· EC2 (Inter-AZ)· S3· NAT Gateway· Lambda· Load balancers (ALB, ELB, NLB)I can tell you this can become quite a shock, and even when you think you have solved it, you probably have only moved the costs. Technical teams need to spend time thinking about how they access and move data in the Public Cloud to avoid or minimize these costs. There is no silver bullet here, but you could ask for a private pricing agreement with your provider of choice if you are willing to commit.Managed Services in the Cloud­Don't let me down nowManaged service solutions in the cloud are fantastic, and I advocate using them where applicable to your business. Solutions like ElasticSearch, ElastiCache, RDS, etc., are great. But there are hidden costs--watch it. In most of these cases, the biggest culprit to drive costs with these services is: inefficient use of resources due to incorrect or poor design of service, ease of deployment ("Oh, I could use this EC cluster / RDS instance to manage the metadata about my service" x 100 services ... Yikes!), or improper data usage and storage ("Let's keep the data for ... 10 years since you never know." .... Whoops!)So, what to do; think about your use of these services, and if you see them proliferating, stop and ask the question--Do you really need them and how can we do this better??Wasted ResourcesOne last area to focus on is that of Wasted resources or, better said, anything that is still not in use, get rid of it. I cannot tell you how many Load Balancers with no hosts attached, or Elastic IPs not attached to hosts, or DNS/Route53 entries pointed to non-existent resources, or CloudFront entries no longer in use, or unattached Storage Volumes or Snapshots that are older than the account has been around (haha, jk ... wanted to see if you were paying attention), etc. While cleaning up is good hygiene, the cloud providers give you Zero (0) tools to help with this ... So, you are on your own! And why would they want to give you the tools? [One side note--not only is it important from a cost perspective, in some cases, these wasted resources could be security flaws just waiting to be taken advantage of.]The suggestion to fix--work with your teams to write Lambda jobs that scour for unused resources and report on them and then if no longer needed ... DELETE! Or, you could use tools from companies like CloudHealth (https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/) that allow you to scour your resources, create reports for your users, and then create a governance trail to clean up the waste. We have used the tooling from CloudHealth successfully to save thousands of dollars per month.Show Me the MoneySo, to recap, if you want to save money in the cloud and make your CFO your best buddy, here are the things you should do to improve your lot:1. For Cloud Compute - Leverage Spot/Preemptible/Low Priority VMs first and foremost, followed by Reserved Instances, followed by On-Demand2. Watch your Transfer Costs closely3. Managed Services are the bomb - as long as you have good retention policies and architecture reviews to ensure right-sized services4. Remove the Waste as quickly as you can (or monitor and then remove) Josh Schlanger
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