The increasing adoption of cloud technologies has led to challenges in cost optimization, with predictions indicating potential budget overshooting. There is a need to constantly evaluate new cloud services, ensuring they align with business goals and are cost-effective. Businesses should be aware of the potential cost implications as services scale and the importance of tools that could be used to monitor and control costs.
GS Lab | GAVS conducted a webinar, ‘Escalating Cloud Costs and How to Manage Them’ where Mr. Manish Sapariya, VP – Technical Operations at KPOINT and Mr. Vinod Borole, Software Architect at GS Lab | GAVS were the panelists. Mr. Kunal Shah moderated the session.
Common Leakages Causes in AWS Cloud Management
There are various causes for leakage, including scale, usage, people, tools, and automation. All these reasons, individually or collectively, can result in leakages and increase costs. Some of the common types of leakages include:
- Instance Leaks – Instances that are provisioned but not actively used or terminated can incur unnecessary costs. For example, instances running for development or testing purposes that are forgotten or not terminated.
- Volume Leaks – Unused Amazon EBS volumes will lead to storage costs. Sometimes, EBS volumes attached to instances but no longer needed can lead to volume leaks.
- Snapshot Leaks – Companies can incur storage costs due to unused Amazon EBS snapshots created for backup purposes but not regularly managed.
- Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Leaks – Old AMIs created for backup or testing but no longer necessary can also incur storage costs.
- Reserved Instance (RI) Leaks – RIs purchased for instances no longer in use can result in higher costs due to unoptimized reserve capacity.
- Underutilization of Instances – Running instances with more CPU or memory than actually required results in wasted resources and higher costs.
- Unused Lambda Functions – AWS Lambda functions created for a temporary project but not removed can result in costs for idle functions.
- Elastic IP (EIP) Leaks – Elastic IPs reserved but not associated with any running instance can result in costs for the unattached IPs.
- Unused Load Balancers – Load balancers created for a specific project that has been decommissioned can add to costs if left unattended.
Things to Remember Before Cloud Adoption
While embarking on a cloud journey, it is essential to remember these six key points:
- Cloud-Native Architecture: Embrace a cloud-native architecture from the beginning. Keep evaluating and adapting your choices based on the evolving landscape of cloud services.
- Evaluating New Services: Be cautious about the excitement of new cloud services. Evaluate whether they align with your business model and are genuinely beneficial. Experiment, evaluate, and make informed decisions.
- Cost Perspective: While new services can accelerate product development, consider their cost implications, especially as you scale. Strive for balance between innovation and cost-effectiveness.
- Cloud-Neutral Strategy: Consider a cloud-neutral strategy, and migrate services to open stack, ensuring flexibility and cost reduction.
- Analytics and Performance: As the company grows, analytics and performance can generate substantial data, impacting costs. Keep a close eye on these aspects and implement tools like CloudGain (a tool developed by GS Lab | GAVS, previously called Value Cloud) for cost monitoring.
- Constant Cost Monitoring: Use tools like CloudGain to monitor costs constantly. Fluctuations in cost can be significant with various services, and having a watchful eye is crucial to avoid overshooting budgets.
CloudGain by GS Lab | GAVS
CloudGain is a comprehensive tool that mines through your AWS and Azure billing details and usage over a period of time to analyze and recommend reductions in cloud spend. CloudGain was developed to address the cost challenges faced by small and medium-sized software companies, including startups when migrating to or building products on the cloud. The tool assists customers in optimizing their cloud costs effectively by providing actionable insights and recommendations. Initially, manual scripts were used to gather data on billing trends, cost spikes, and resource leaks.
CloudGain operates by gaining read access to a customer’s AWS or Azure cloud, processing and analyzing usage and billing data, and generating actionable insights. The tool provides visibility into spending, services used, and instances provisioned. It identifies unutilized resources, compares on-demand resources against reserved spending, and suggests potential savings. The results are presented in reports, alerts, or notifications, which can be customized based on user preferences.
For more on our cloud solutions and services please visit https://www.gslab.com/cloud/.
This blog is a gist of the webinar that you can watch here. For more such videos, please visit https://www.gslab.com/webinars/ and https://www.gavstech.com/videos/.
