Cloud computing is possibly the biggest IT trend of the decade. It has seized much of the business from traditional data centers and has completely changed the way IT is delivered by businesses. The possibility to provision more servers in minutes and scale-up to meet the ever-increasing workloads is something that any business with a data center can only dream of. But with cloud computing, comes the cloud costs. If done without thought, it can mean large bills for organizations. Here’s how to keep your costs low and still gain the elevation of business that cloud offers with Google Cloud cost optimization.
Businesses on GCP are boosting their Return on Investment (RoI) exponentially by slashing unnecessary spends on cloud, with GCP’s cloud cost optimization strategies. Niveus plays a key role in delivering these practical cost optimization services for our GCP customers. By identifying areas of unnecessary cost incurrence, formulating suitable cost optimization options with GCP, and leveraging the best practices in cloud migration, our clients gain significant reduction in TCO and increased RoI.
GCP Cost optimization best practices & services
Avoiding Idle Resources – One of the major culprits for wasted and unnecessary costs on cloud are idle resources. Generally, these non-production resources are used during the working week and aren’t used 24/7. But if the resource is ‘idle’, then businesses are paying for things that aren’t being used all the time. There are also resources that are running past the time period of requirement and forgotten by the business owners.
With GCP, you can schedule VMs to auto-start and stop, which means, with a platform like Compute Engine, you only pay for the compute resources that are used. VMs can be timed to function during specified hours and days and turning them off when not in use, cuts a lot of costs! Eg – the non-production workload can be scheduled to run from 8 AM to 8 PM on weekdays.
With Google Cloud, businesses also get several Recommenders for optimizing these resources such as idle VM recommenders. These recommenders identify inactive Virtual Machines (VMs), unused Static IPs and Persistent Disks based on usage metrics.
You can also delete instances that aren’t required past a point. While deleting instances gets rid of the underlying disk(s) and all of its data, a best practice is to take a snapshot of the instance before deleting it.
Rightsized resources – Overprovisioning is a common risk that businesses tend to walk into while migrating to cloud from OnPrem and can act as a major leak for cloud funds. While migrating, businesses in a fear of underprovisioning, would take on a much larger capacity resource than what is required. They are effectively then paying more for a resource size that can neither be used in its entirety, nor required.
GCP’s extensive scalability allows businesses to rightsize their VMs by creating a custom machine type with the right amount of CPU and RAM to meet your needs. Businesses can always employ just the right capacity resource that they require and realize significant savings. GCP’s rightsizing recommendations identify areas to effectively downsize your machine configurations by closely monitoring the vCPU and RAM usage over a period of eight days from the data gathered by Cloud Stackdriver Logging and Monitoring. .
The ease of automation – Businesses once on cloud, need to keep monitoring their areas of expenditure to keep up with the varying cloud uses. Automating this process brings a lot of worthwhile cost savings which would otherwise be lost.
With Google Cloud, businesses can optimize and automatically manage VM instances. From simple time-based instance schedules to tools like Cloud Composer, serverless platform to replace the Virtual Machine management overheads, GCP offers a large array of automated management on cloud.
The annual spend on IaaS on public cloud comes to around 64 billion dollars, with an annual public cloud waste of about 17 billion dollars. Spend attributed to cloud waste comes to around 20%-35%. Cloud solutions such as Hashicorp’s Terraform Enterprise minimize cloud waste via automation and helps you to save on cost considerably.
Overview of total spend – The very nature of cloud computing allows businesses to scale their resources up and down on demand, but to use it effectively, they need to monitor usage closely. Accurate monitoring and tracking of cloud usage is key to effective scaling. As cloud pricing varies on a number of variables, ensuring that businesses are on top of all that goes on within their environment is crucial.
With an array of no-cost billing and cost management tools for deep and extensive visibility and insights, Google Cloud lets you keep up with your cloud deployment. With regular billing reports, department-wise budgets, quotas and alerts, and more. Businesses can be aware of their cloud usage so that nothing gets away and out of hand. With custom dashboards, businesses can also procure granular cost views and monitor costs overtime and begin predictively managing costs on cloud
Niveus’ cost optimization services
As part of our own cloud cost optimization endeavors, Niveus provides a current bill analysis and comparison for businesses and recommends GCP solutions for optimizing costs on cloud.
- We discover areas of potential, by holding working sessions with customer leadership and engineering teams to collect information on your infrastructure, usage, and spends
- We review the dashboard on a regular basis and identify potential opportunities with customer’s spend on an ongoing basis, weeding out unnecessary, undetected, and avoidable spends
- We report, as per our review, detailed findings to the account team and customer, to support optimization recommendations that can then be used to make informed decisions
- We recommend a list of features applicable to the customer’s use case and arrange applicable Project Managers to facilitate detailed discussions as needed
Simplifying cloud cost optimization with Google Stratozone
Automate the process: By using Google Cloud offerings like Stratozone, we conduct intelligent, secure, and agentless assessments of your On-prem machines along with mapping out cost/infrastructure optimization solutions automatically.
Stratozone will automatically monitor, discover, and review your On-prem assets over a period of time and recommend prime cost optimization options as well as the best migration route to cloud. This tool can save time and effort and allow businesses to move to the cloud in a secure and wallet-efficient manner.
Other not-to-be-missed GCP cost optimization offerings –
Pre-migration customization of machines: A unique Google Cloud offering that allows new users to choose tailor-made machines and storage spaces that meet their requirements precisely without risk of overprovisioning.
Post migration optimization of operations: This allows you to use GKE clusters while on the cloud that automatically scale up or scale down as and when needed, letting you avoid wastage of resources caused by letting machines run idle.
Automatic and committed use discounts: Consumption based discounts and rewards that allow you to save and earn as you go. Businesses get Compute Engine resources at a discounted price of upto 57% for most resources (70% for memory-optimized machine types) in exchange for committing to paying for those resources for 1 year or 3 years.
Preemptible VMs: These are highly affordable compute instances for a period of 24 hours and 80% cheaper than regular instances.
Optimizing on data solutions: With how data is driving much of the direction of businesses, it is only imperative that businesses optimize their cost on data solutions such as BigQuery. From configuring default table expiration on your dataset, to choosing batch loading over streaming insights, businesses can receive better costs on BigQuery
Saving on cloud is simpler with GCP. To know more on how to save costs better, email us today at biz@niveussolutions.com
