‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ is a popular holiday song and was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle in 1963. It was popularized in North America by singer Andy Williams that same year on his television show by the same name. However, we didn’t have to do much research to learn that the inspiration for that song had nothing to do with the 4th quarter for most business leaders and their respective companies. Anecdotally, we believe most business leaders might say it’s the most *stressful* time of the year, especially for publicly traded companies – most of whom have their fiscal year end aligned with the calendar year end of ...
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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 fourth installment in the series: Reserve Your Instance In exchange for an upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years, AWS (“ Reserved instances”), Microsoft Azure (‘Reserved Savings’) and GCP (‘Commitment Price’] offer significant cost savings (anywhere from ~29% up to 72%) ...
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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 12 here). AWS, Azure and GCP offer data storage services that include a range of options in term of cost and performance. You can choose from several different storage classes (and pricing) depending on how frequently the data will be accessed, how long you need to store the data, and the ...
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Supplier lock-in has been a major issue with savvy decision makers for many years, and with good reason. Allowing your company to be overly subjugated to a specific supplier (often with little control of the situation) often turns into a monopolistic relationship. The script gets flipped and rather than exercising your buyer power, you become the passive party, beholden to any changes in terms and conditions having little power to stop it. Unfortunately, with the exodus from data centers to the cloud, companies are now finding themselves being locked-in to AWS, Azure or Google with their increased need for cloud flexibility and scalability ...
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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 12 here). Our eighth chapter in the series: Elastic IPs Elastic IPs (‘EIPs’) An Elastic IP is static and is assigned to a given instance regardless of the instance's state. The “elasticity” of the IP address enables you to stop EC2 instances and transfer the IP address to another EC2 instance—or ...
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Oracle Rewards! Oracle recently launched a new program selling ocean-front property in Arkansas. Bonus! North of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, they also have land available for purchase. Rewards and Credits! The deal is that for every acre you buy in Alaska, you get a credit toward your Arkansas property! Sounds like a good deal, right? Except however, when you fully understand that Arkansas is not on the ocean, and you have zero need for land in Alaska (no offense meant to Alaskans). Yes, they are not really selling land, but in classic Oracle fashion, they have put together a ‘rewards’ program that purports to lower your support costs but ...
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Inflation impacts the cost of nearly all your supplier agreements. Look closely at your IT agreements (especially your Cloud agreements). Even though the cost of technology goes down over time, and technology advancements make processes less manual, less error prone, less expensive, and more automated, many of your agreements still have antiquated clauses allowing your suppliers to *increase* your costs on an annual basis by an amount equal to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) amount, and generally include an accelerator above that amount; something like CPI + 3%, which would provide a contractual right of your supplier to increase your costs ...
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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 12 here). Our seventh chapter in the series: Use Spot Pricing Spot Instances are spare compute capacity at a steep discount (up to 90%) to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances can go down with very little notice. While they are frequently used to supplement On-Demand Instances, they aren’t meant to ...
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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 12 here). Our sixth chapter in the series: CloudWatch with Autoscaling AWS CloudWatch (Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring) enables you to collect consumption metrics and set up alarms to invoke actions. These tools collect these metrics, allows you to visualize them and to define alarms with the ...
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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 12 here). Our fifth chapter in the series: Size it Right! Once you have deployed resources for a while, you have to check that your instances are optimal. For most clients, instances are set with the right configuration at time of the launch. As your consumption and business environment evolve, ...
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