Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the second installment in the series: Consolidation. Consolidating under-utilized and over-utilized instances out of your fleet can be a quick start on the path of cost savings. By leveraging native analytics, you can generate recommendations toward consolidation (e.g. ...
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Cloud is an integral part of almost every company's strategic technology portfolio. As legacy migrations continue and cloud spend increases across every industry, its never been more critical to understand both your specific cloud investments, and the suppliers (AWS) that drive them. Only those that fully understand these market dynamics will enjoy the competitive advantage that comes with informed insight. Conversely, those who fail to comprehend their waste, overspend and the market dynamics behind it, are doomed to escalating spend, blown budgets, and lagging transformation efforts. Below we give you that market insight, updates on AWS as ...
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Shut it off. Simple right? Sounds like something you might say to your children whenever they leave the light on in a room. But like any endeavor, shutting off instances in the cloud does take some amount of wherewithal and effort. Begin by identifying idle and under-utilized instances out of your fleet. By leveraging native analytics (e.g. AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Advisor, Google Compute Engine), you can generate a list of these instances across regions and workloads. After a quick audit with your technology team or application owners, you can take a step toward savings realization by: Terminating/deleting idle instances ...
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AWS experienced a significant outage on November 21st, 2020 that impacted customers located in one (US-East-1) of AWS’ 23 geographic regions. The region was significant however, given the number of companies that publicly stated their issues via social media channels: Coinbase Glassdoor iRobot – impacted home app which, according to LinkedIn security employee, effected his ability to vacuum home Roku Vonage The Washington Post Ring doorbells started not working And more… According to a report by ZDnet, AWS attributed the outage “to errors with its Kinesis data-streaming service. While many of the impacted services don't use AWS Kinesis, ...
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In the ‘race to the cloud’, many organizations are not realizing the promised cost benefits of moving to their infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, many are finding that they are spending far more than they anticipated. While Organizations should save 15% or more by moving to the cloud infrastructure, a 2020 report[1] shows that realizing these savings is not straightforward: 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) budgets, due to a lack of cost optimization approaches. 45% of organizations that perform lift-and-shift to cloud Infrastructure, without optimization analysis, will overprovision up to ...
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The front lines of the Cloud Cost Optimization battle are not going well for many. Sadly, the worst part of the story is, that most don’t even know it yet. As Cloud investments go deeper and broader throughout corporate computing environments, so too is the waste and damage to IT budgets. I’ve been in IT long enough to witness hundreds of companies implement and manage thousands of different environments with hundreds of various suppliers. Suffice it to say, I’ve been around. So, when I tell you that waste and overspend on Cloud are at frightening levels, you should pay attention when I share why, and what you might be able to do about it. ...
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Lately we have seen a rise in cloud customers reliance on widely available online tools that purport to help an enterprise calculate everything from pricing, usage workloads to TCO. Some of the primary tools often cited are: Azure Pricing Calculator AWS Pricing Calculator AWS Total Cost of Ownership Oracle Cloud Workload Estimator Google Pricing Calculator We are here to confirm what your likely first instincts are when attempting to use these tools, which is they are wrong, a futile exercise, and probably biased, given the hundreds of data points and variables in every cloud environment. Wrong First, they are wrong. Always. Maybe it’s a ...
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Like a migrating herd of Wildebeest across the Serengeti, companies around the globe continue its rush toward that shimmering lake of Cloud Compute that promises lowers costs, increased flexibility and scalability (and more according to the brochures). As with any panacea, the dream usually falls short of the reality. Cloud compute for many has hit that ‘middle ground’ where actual benefits and unexpected problems meet. As the body of problem evidence mounts for Cloud Compute, there are some clear myths that have arisen that need to be ‘debunked’. Only when these myths are fully understood can organizations minimize the risks and still ...
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Do you have AWS Zombies lurking in your environment? If you are an AWS customer, probably you do. AWS Zombies are likely roaming your cloud instances gaining power, destroying all they touch, and if you don’t kill them off soon, they may take over your bills altogether. What are AWS Zombies? AWS Zombies are described as unused (and often hidden) assets that keep contributing to the ongoing costs of your AWS Cloud without producing any value. What are the four most common types of AWS Zombies? 1: Unattached EBS Volumes Clients should seek out and kill AWS Zombies like unattached EBS Volumes: When you provision an Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) ...
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If you missed Part I - start here. Is a Cloud Broker right for you? A Cloud Broker by definition is an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers. As cloud computing evolves, the integration of cloud services may be too complex for Cloud consumers to manage alone. A Cloud Broker can also be in a unique position to collect, analyze and conduct opportunity assessments on pricing that will be key to a multicloud or Cloud Arbitrage strategy. Generally, cloud arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more ...
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