Cost-Effective Cloud Strategies: Avoid Overspending
People often use cloud services while starting a new project. Cloud infrastructure provides many advantages, but there is a problem too. It’s easy to spend all your budget while purchasing more capacity than necessary or using not the most effective solutions.
We want to share tips on how to reduce the costs of cloud services. The recommendations are based on extensive experience working with a variety of cloud providers. Therefore, these tips can be called universal. They really help to reduce the cost of cloud services.
Regularly Check Unused Instances, Volume, Files In S3 Repositories, And Allocated IP Addresses
Such optimization does not have much effect, but there is almost always some garbage that can be cleaned up.
Constantly Evaluate The Efficiency Of The Used Resources
It is common to find that high-capacity instances are underutilized and not regularly monitored.Optimizing these instances can lead to significant cost reductions. Consider, for instance, if an instance is created to handle peak loads that only occur several times a week. In such cases, introducing autoscaling would be a more cost-effective solution.
In some cases, the app demands much power from the CPU, but RAM won’t be necessary, or vice versa. In this case, it will be cheaper to keep several instances of a simpler configuration.
Use CDN For Static Content
Static content is usually distributed from instances or S3, which is more expensive than using a CDN (content delivery network). This is due to the geographical distance of the servers from the end users. When static content is distributed from remote servers or repositories, this increases the delay in delivering content to users, especially if they are far away. It can lead to congestion and slow response when multiple users request static resources from a single server. CDN provides high bandwidth and it is specialized in the efficient delivery of such content.
CDN is designed to serve millions of requests from users at the same time, which makes them more efficient for working with great loads. The cost of using a CDN is usually based on a tariff plan that provides fixed rates for the amount of data transfer or the number of requests. It makes costs more predictable and allows you to reduce costs, especially with a large volume of traffic.
That is especially important for media sites or e-commerce, where the number of images. It supposes the most part of the load. Traffic usually takes a half or more of the cost of all cloud costs, and transferring traffic to CDN will save money.
Assessing the Need for Managed Cloud Solutions
There are many managed cloud solutions that cost less than traditional instances.With experience in utilizing these managed solutions, you can significantly reduce your financial costs.
Optimize GPU Usage in the Cloud to Reduce Costs
GPU instances are very expensive. There are many services where you can rent a video card for a while at a price lower than the cloud to train ML models. It can be more profitable to use non-cloud solutions for production tasks.
Do You Really Need Backup Infrastructure?
Improving fault tolerance can greatly increase costs. For example, backup instances and load balancers for a critical application can double the cost of the cloud. Check if you need it. Sure you want to be available 24/7, but is it really necessary?
Spot Instances Using
Spot instances are a type of virtual servers provided by cloud providers. They are usually much cheaper than on-demand instances and are provided at a big discount, which makes them attractive for customers who want to reduce the cost of cloud resources.
Such virtual servers are based on the availability of unused computing resources in the cloud. It means they can only be obtained if there are free resources available. If these resources are required for other purposes, spot instances can be terminated with prior notification. So, such instances are perfect for tasks that can be interrupted and continued without serious consequences.
Think Twice Before Migrating High-Traffic or GPU-Intensive Applications to the Cloud
Local solutions are usually much cheaper for demanding projects. For example, a local powerful GPU server will be 2-3 times cheaper. It sounds strange, but maybe you just don't need the cloud service.
If the project configuration is already settled and does not require major changes, then moving to dedicated servers can be much cheaper.
Make The List Of The Necessary Resources
If you intend to purchase cloud resources for an extended period, it is advisable to speak with a sales manager to secure guaranteed capacity for a specified duration. As a result, you can get a discount.
Rational use of cloud resources allows you to optimize costs and avoid unnecessary expenses. Proper planning and monitoring will help make the cloud truly effective.
Follow our advice and cloud infrastructure costs will definitely decrease.
