Overview

“Cost control is fundamental to successful cloud adoption”

To make cost control possible, financial transparency is essential. In an organisation that has fully embraced cloud, it should be possible that those using cloud resources, services and solutions can be held and feel responsible for controlling the costs and continuously optimising the spend: “the user pays”.​

For instance, business domains are responsible for the cost of the SaaS solutions they use, management is responsible for making sure that cloud costs are included in product pricing, and DevOps teams must be responsible for controlling costs related to their solutions and features. Cloud costs, to a large extent, vary with the use of resources and can increase significantly over a very short period. Hence the need to implement cost controls and increase cost awareness.​

DevOps teams can allocate budget to a solution and monitor spend, using alerts. By optimising the solution in terms of using the most cost-efficient services, DevOps teams can increase customer’s satisfaction. Cloud costs can be managed in many ways, and there are several opportunities to drive down costs in cloud. Cloud services are available in different forms and variations, and it pays to evaluate purpose and fit periodically. For instance, there are several different database management systems which can be used. They can be evaluated based on functional fit, but also on costs. Updated resource models could also mean reduced costs. For example, if the cloud service provider updates IaaS instance models it could be that a newer, smaller model provides just enough resources to handle your workload: all in all, little effort to save cost.​

As cloud services are updated and added frequently, their life cycle is much shorter than we are used to. A regular evaluation of services used, makes sense. DevOps teams should also think of an automation strategy with the goal to optimise costs. Shutting down VMs when they are not needed is an obvious one. Also, DevOps teams must comply with the organisation’s tagging strategy to warrant correct costs reports.

Activities checklist

Initial:

• Designing and implementing dashboards to increase cloud spend insight and ownership​
• Implementing feedback loops from cost discrepancies to technology choices ​
• Incorporating cost optimisation in agile workflow​
• Training teams and team leads on the cost control and  optimisation opportunities​
• Drafting tagging strategy​
• Drafting an automation strategy with regard to cost optimisation

Recurring:

• Analysing operational costs as input for business case​
• Configuring budget alerts and thresholds​
• Monitoring and document approved deviations from policies and principles to account for cost increase​
• Continuously optimising cloud spend, both proactively and reactively

RASCI