The process of minimizing your overall cloud expense by targeting mismanaged resources, securing capacity for bigger discounts, removing waste, and rightsizing the computing service to scale is called cloud cost optimization. 

The cloud provides enterprises with unlimited scalability with cost-effective IT costs, where you only need to pay for the resources you have used. You can properly choose and assign the appropriate resource to an application or workload through cloud cost optimization.

When compliance, cost, and workload performance are properly and continually balanced against the best-suitable infrastructure in real time, then you can achieve total efficiency. 

Each workload and application need unique infrastructure, and these needs evolve. The base performance is normally achieved by using domain knowledge when choosing workload resources. However, using cloud resources to these workloads can be further optimized by using machine intelligence.  

Why are enterprises anxious about cloud optimization?

Cloud optimization is a solution for IT Operation teams. This is especially true for DevOps and CloudOps, depending on the enterprise responsible for allocating the resources. 

These highly-skilled people are usually caught between the requirements set by the finance department, controlling the cloud expenses, and the application owners who don’t want their app resources to be reduced.  

For modern enterprises to become successful, it is vital that IT Ops can control these stakeholders. Cloud optimization can make it possible and allows CloudOps to fully leverage cloud value-for-spend that soothes the CFO and Finance Analyst and delivers the best app reporting and performance. 

Public cloud optimization uses cases

  • Infrastructure modernization and reduction vial cloud instance rightsizing. 
  • Risk reduction on application by rightsizing instances according to intra-day workload pattern. 
  • Optimization of container 
  • Automation via self-aware instances. 
  • Automation via self-optimizing cloud apps. 
  • Better matching via cloud provider comparison. 
  • Compliance and reduction of cost via public cloud billing visibility. 

Hybrid cloud optimization uses cases 

  • Real time response and proactive optimization for bare metal cloud and virtual infrastructure. 
  • Elastic cloud for VMware infrastructure 
  • Workload reservation and routing 
  • Storage resource optimization 
  • Software license optimization 
  • Digital transformation via efficient cloud migration modeling and planning 
  • Server transformation and refresh analysis 

How to achieve cloud optimization?  

Service matching, optimization recommendation, and workload modeling 

Cloud optimization solutions analyze and model the pattern for every workload that includes operational cost, usage, and history. Incorporate this analysis with the grasp in configuration and the cloud services available, then bring recommendations to improve workload-to-service matching. These insights allow IT Operations to come up with better cloud decisions and boost business innovation. 

Cloud cost visibility and optimization 

Cloud complexity and costs exponentially inflate as infrastructure grows. While the first-generation cloud optimization solutions aim at cloud spend optimization and cost visibility, these are a fundamental byproduct of more sophisticated advanced solutions built mainly to ensure wider efficiency, such as risk reduction and app performance for organizations. 

Continuous optimization and workload automation 

Advanced solutions do more than making recommendations to allow the enterprise to automate the execution of these suggestions to any extent they are comfortable. You can partially achieve this workload automation by utilizing the recommended optimization to begin productivity in IT service management programs and make it ongoing through the optimization-as-code-driven continuous program. 

Why do you need cloud cost optimization? 

Transparency 

The key to achieving the cloud’s full benefits is transparency. You need to find the poorly utilized or managed resources and create customized solutions to control the cloud, focusing on cost optimization, availability, and security according to enterprise needs. 

Governance 

Normally, the cloud’s user side follows certain procedures to guarantee compliance measures, taking away control over the cloud’s vendor side. You should know that the cloud has shared responsibility on both sides to keep a compliant environment and have the needed stets to achieve continuous compliance. 

Predictability 

Efficient cloud usage is possible only by being aware of cloud consumption. According to usage, you should identify opportunities to store cloud resources in advance to get higher discounts. Moreover, you must perform rightsizing of the cloud resources and customize them to scale smoothly to achieve cloud optimization. 

The cloud holds huge potential. The promise of saving a lot on cloud expenses can be achieved as long as you focus on cloud cost optimization. Modern cloud computing customers have become more aggressive than ever. They are enjoying the benefits of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and new services. It is important to make sure that the cost and usage synced in with demand dynamically. You should get the right resources for the workload, size them to meet the demand, and meet the compliances and security in a phased manner.