Careful Workload Placement Can Create Cloud Cost Savings
Most organizations that adopt a cloud platform do so expecting that it will improve their overall IT operating costs. The pay-as-you-go pricing models of infrastructure as a service offer a built-in promise of trimming the IT resource fat.
However, many organizations discover that creating cost savings from cloud infrastructure requires careful and considered use, and that lifting and shifting applications into cloud environments does not necessarily produce savings.
The challenge: controlling cost
Companies using cloud platforms quickly recognize that controlling cost is an ongoing strategic and technical challenge. Among the respondents to 451 Research’s "Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting and Managed Services, Budgets & Outlook 2022 survey, more than half (52%) say they are currently working to solve the challenge of optimizing cloud infrastructure for cost.
Cost optimization
These efforts at controlling cost frequently include the choice of platform (or platforms), the careful engineering of systems, or the use of advanced optimization tools. Many businesses are implementing multicloud approaches and embracing cloud-native architectures and methodologies as part of an overall cost-optimization approach.
One common thread across all these optimization approaches is that cost-effective use of cloud requires the careful placement of workloads in the environments that are best suited to their execution.
Five cloud cost-saving measures
Below are a few examples of how decisions about workload placement within a hybrid or multicloud environment can directly impact the cost of business operations, including:
Pay for what you use
Compare prices across cloud platforms
Consider the cost of access to data
Foster developer efficiency
Put content closer to the end user
1. Pay for what you use
Paying for what you use — a core piece of the cloud premise — has an inherent cost benefit. This is especially applicable wherever workloads have highly variable demand, and existing systems are built to accommodate peaks.
Workloads with predictable demand are less able to take advantage of this measure and may in fact benefit from other cost structures. Workload placement decisions should consider things like instance type, commitment, and dedicated resources to produce the most effective cost structure.
2. Compare prices across cloud platforms
Price (and pricing complexity) can be a major distinguishing feature among cloud platforms. Organizations that have access to clouds with lower-cost resources can include cost as a significant factor in workload placement decisions and can avoid paying for access to larger cloud feature sets for workloads that don’t require them.
3. Consider the cost of access to data
Applications that frequently pull data from cloud storage environments have the potential to run up data egress costs where those apply. The cost of retrieving data should be a consideration (and can be a source of savings) when choosing an environment for this type of workload.
4. Foster developer efficiency
Providing development teams with the ability to provision resources directly (or programmatically) is an efficiency benefit inherent in public cloud (and some private) systems, and only elevated by cloud-native technologies and methodologies.
However, platforms that allow developer teams to work with familiar technologies and existing skill sets can further improve development time and allow organizations to limit the requirement for more costly areas of cloud platform expertise.
5. Put content closer to the end user
Geographic and regional footprint is another characteristic that distinguishes cloud platforms. Although global reach is a function of all major cloud platforms, the distribution of those footprints can be varied — while one platform may provide major capacity at a regional level, another may offer a more granular footprint into individual geographic areas.
In addition to the innate performance and user experience benefits of closer proximity, the availability of a more precise footprint may reduce the cost of connectivity by allowing a business to centralize an application or put content close to the end user.
Cost is a universal concern
This is by no means an exhaustive list of cloud cost-saving measures, which also includes many operational and technical choices, tools, and services. However, it should illustrate that just as cost is a universal concern for organizations that employ cloud infrastructure, it should also be a constant consideration when choosing where workloads should operate across IT environments.
Balancing cost, performance, privacy, and compliance
Cost may not be the most important consideration for every workload. Certainly, an organization may be willing to sacrifice savings to ensure application performance, data privacy, or compliance. But cost will be an outcome of every workload placement decision across cloud environments.
