Tag: CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT

Azure Cost Optimization Cloud Cost Optimization

Azure ACR Cost Optimization Practices

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date March 28, 2025

What is Azure Container Registry?

Azure Container Registry (ACR) is a fully managed container image registry service provided by Microsoft Azure. It allows developers to securely store, manage, and deploy Docker container images efficiently. By leveraging Docker distribution, ACR facilitates the storage and distribution of container images, seamlessly integrating with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and other containerized environments.

How Azure Container Registry Works

ACR serves as a centralized repository where teams can push, pull, and manage container images. It supports both private and public registries, providing controlled access to stored images. Developers can also integrate ACR with their CI/CD pipelines to automate image builds, vulnerability scans, and deployments.

Azure Container Registry Service Tiers

Azure Container Registry offers three service tiers: Basic, Standard, and Premium. Each tier provides different levels of performance, storage, and advanced features to meet various operational needs.

Basic:
- Cost-effective tier for small-scale projects and testing.
- Supports image deletion, webhooks, and Microsoft Entra authentication.
- Suitable for lower throughput and storage needs.
Standard:
- Designed for production workloads requiring higher throughput.
- Includes more storage and better performance than the Basic tier.
Premium:
- Best suited for enterprise-level applications requiring high availability.
- Offers advanced features like geo-replication, content trust for image signing, and private link for restricted access.

Note: While ACR lacks built-in lifecycle management, ACR Tasks can be used to automate cleanup and lifecycle processes.

Azure Container Registry Pricing: What You Need to Know

ACR pricing is based on three key factors:

1. Service Tier: Basic, Standard, and Premium, each offering different levels of storage and throughput.

2. Additional Features: Geo-replication, pull-through cache, and data transfer may incur extra costs.

3. Storage and Usage: Costs vary based on the amount of storage consumed and the frequency of image pulls and pushes.

Common Optimization Challenges with Azure Container Registry

Despite its robust features, optimizing Azure Container Registry can present several challenges:

Storage Costs: Inefficient image management increases storage expenses.
Image Lifecycle Management: Manual cleanup can be labor-intensive without automated policies.
Geo-Replication Overhead: While improving availability, it incurs additional costs.
Redundant Image Pulls: Frequent, unnecessary pulls increase bandwidth consumption and cost.

Best Practices for Azure ACR Cost Optimization Practices

To control and reduce ACR costs, consider these effective strategies:

1. Enable Image Retention Policies: Regularly clean up outdated and unused images to minimize storage.

2. Use ACR Tasks: Automate image builds, vulnerability scans, and cleanup to reduce manual intervention.

3. Leverage Pull-Through Cache: Cache frequently accessed images to reduce bandwidth consumption.

4. Optimize Geo-Replication Usage: Limit replication to essential regions to lower costs.

5. Monitor Usage and Costs: Utilize Azure Monitor and Azure Cost Management to track and manage expenses.

How CloudCADI Helps Optimize Azure Container Registry Costs

CloudCADI provides advanced, automated solutions for optimizing Azure Container Registry costs. Key benefits include:

Automated Cost Analysis: Gain real-time insights into ACR storage and data transfer costs.
Policy-Based Optimization: Implement automated image retention and cleanup policies.
Registry Tier Recommendations Based on Usage: The system evaluates Azure Container Registries (ACRs) based on their current tier (Basic, Standard, Premium) and usage (storage size, webhook count, geo-replication), and recommends tier changes if certain thresholds are exceeded, such as recommending moving from Premium to Standard or from Standard to Basic if the current registry’s usage is below the specified limits for a lower-tier.
Repository and Image Cleanup Recommendations: The system analyzes the age and size of repositories and images in ACR, recommending cleanup for older repositories and images that have not been updated for a specified number of days, helping to optimize storage and reduce costs by eliminating outdated data.
Continuous Monitoring: Track usage trends to identify and resolve cost inefficiencies.

Conclusion

Azure Container Registry simplifies container management by offering a secure, scalable, and highly available solution for storing and distributing container images. With features like automated image scanning, geo-replication, and authentication through Azure Active Directory (AAD), ACR ensures a robust and efficient container workflow for organizations. By implementing cost optimization strategies and leveraging tools like CloudCADI, businesses can effectively manage ACR costs while maintaining performance and security.

Stay tuned for more updates and additional content on Azure Container Registry!

Author

Prativa Mohapatra, is our Software Engineer L2 who has played a key role in Azure ACR Optimization feature in CloudCADI.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION TOOLS, CLOUD FINOPS, CLOUD FINOPS TOOLS

Best Practices to Reduce Amazon ECS Costs

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date February 7, 2025

What is Amazon ECS?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. It seamlessly integrates with Docker and AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), enabling organizations to provide a scalable and cost-effective environment for running containerized workloads on AWS.

How Amazon ECS Works?

An Amazon ECS cluster is a logical grouping of tasks or services. Tasks and services are run on infrastructure registered to the cluster, which can include:

AWS Fargate: A serverless compute engine that eliminates the need to manage servers or clusters, charging based on vCPU and memory usage
Amazon EC2 Instances: Provides users with full control over the underlying virtual machine infrastructure while running ECS workloads.

Amazon ECS Pricing: What you need to know?

Understanding Amazon ECS pricing is crucial for optimizing cloud costs. Amazon ECS pricing is based on two main components:

Infrastructure Cost
This is the cost of the underlying infrastructure used to run your ECS workloads. The pricing depends on whether you are using AWS Fargate or Amazon EC2 instances:
- AWS Fargate: Charged based on vCPU and memory usage starting when a container launches and stopping when it terminates. Additional charges apply for operating systems, CPU architecture, and ephemeral storage.
- Amazon EC2 Instances: There is no additional charge for ECS itself when using EC2. You pay for the EC2 instances (On-Demand, Reserved, or Spot instances) that you provision and manage, including storage and data transfer costs (e.g., cross-region communication).
Additional AWS Services Costs
While Amazon ECS itself does not incur extra charges, additional services integrated with ECS contribute to overall costs:
- CloudWatch Metrics: Default ECS metrics (e.g., CPU/Memory Utilization) are free, but custom metrics through CloudWatch Container Insights are billed as custom metrics.
- Elastic Load Balancing (ELB): Any load balancing used to distribute traffic across your ECS tasks incurs charges.
- Data Transfer: Inter-region data transfer or external network egress adds to your AWS bill

Optimization Challenges with Amazon ECS

Over-Provisioning Resources
Many organizations overestimate resource requirements, leading to increased costs and underutilized capacity. Determining the right CPU and memory allocations for tasks can be complex without precise usage insights.

Limited Built-in Monitoring

While Amazon ECS provides default metrics through Amazon CloudWatch, these may not always offer deep visibility into workload performance and resource usage. To address gaps in default metrics, businesses often enable CloudWatch Container Insights to gather additional data. While custom metrics provide valuable insights, they come with added costs and require proper configuration, such as enabling Container Insights.

Managing Spot Instance Availability
While Fargate Spot instances provide significant savings, their availability can be unpredictable. Businesses must balance cost savings with workload reliability when using Spot instances for critical tasks.

Best Cost Optimization Strategies for Amazon ECS

Effective cost management is critical for running containerized applications on Amazon ECS. To maximize savings, businesses must right-size resources, monitor workloads effectively, and choose the right compute options.

Here’s how CloudCADI helps optimize Amazon ECS costs,

Right-Sizing Task Definitions: CloudCADI analyses your ECS task’s CPU and memory usage and recommends optimal configurations. E.g.: For instance, if a task is configured with 1 vCPU and 2 GB memory but only utilizes 0.25 vCPU and 512 MB, CloudCADI suggests scaling down the task definition to match actual usage, thereby minimizing waste.
Optimizing EC2 Launch Types: CloudCADI evaluates your cluster’s EC2 instance usage and provides actionable recommendations. Switch to Existing Instances: If underutilized EC2 instances are available, it suggests running tasks on these resources instead of Fargate. Provisioning New EC2 Instances: If no instances are available, CloudCADI helps determine the most cost-efficient EC2 instance type to support your workload.
Right-Sizing EC2 Instances: For ECS clusters running on EC2, CloudCADI assesses the instance types and usage. If over-provisioned instances (e.g., 4 vCPU and 16 GB memory) are detected for a workload needing only 2 vCPU and 8 GB, it recommends switching to a smaller, cost-efficient instance type.
Leveraging Fargate Spot Instances: For non-critical and fault-tolerant workloads, CloudCADI recommends using Fargate Spot instances, which can save up to 70% compared to regular Fargate pricing. The tool identifies suitable tasks and assists in transitioning to this cost-effective option.

Key Benefits of Using CloudCADI for Amazon ECS Cost Management

Automated Cost Insights – Identify and eliminate wasteful resource allocations.
Optimized ECS Task Definitions – Reduce memory and vCPU over-provisioning.
EC2 & Fargate Optimization – Get real-time recommendations on EC2 instance types and Fargate Spot usage.
Cost-Aware Scaling – Ensure workloads run on the most cost-effective AWS infrastructure.
Enhanced Monitoring – Gain deeper insights into ECS resource usage without unnecessary CloudWatch costs.

Conclusion

Optimizing Amazon ECS workloads is crucial for reducing operational costs and maintaining efficiency. CloudCADI is an indispensable tool for businesses using Amazon ECS. With intelligent resource recommendations and continuous performance monitoring, CloudCADI ensures your ECS configurations are optimized for cost-effectiveness and performance. By leveraging CloudCADI’s insights, organizations can lower costs by right-sizing tasks and instances and scale workloads efficiently using cost-effective strategies like Fargate Spot and EC2.

Want to reduce your Amazon ECS costs? Try CloudCADI today and start saving!

Author

Preethika Nagarajan, is our Software Engineer L2 who has played a key role in Amazon ECS Optimization feature of CloudCADI.

Tags AWS ECS Cost Optimization, CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Cloud FinOps FAQs

Post author By Karthick Perumal
Post date March 12, 2024

Get All the Answers

Cloud has become an integral component for successful business operations. However, alongside the benefits of cloud computing come the complexities of managing costs effectively. Enter Cloud FinOps, a discipline aimed at optimizing cloud spending while maximizing value. It continues to be one of the top cloud priorities in 2024 and the coming years. As organizations embark on this new journey, numerous questions arise regarding FinOps practices. This article covers a few with responses from our cloud finops experts themselves Kathick Perumal, Product Engineering Head and Mukesh Kumar, our Product Architect who holds profound experience in tackling cloud finops challenges of our clients.

1. What is Cloud FinOps?

Cloud FinOps is a practise which enables organization to maximize the value derived from their cloud resources spending.

2. What does Cloud FinOps do?

It offers multiple benefits to the cloud businesses. In a nutshell, it enables developers, operations, finance, and other business teams in comprehending and managing costs associated with cloud computing.
Suggested Reading: What are the benefits of cloud finops?

3. Why is Cloud FinOps important?

Cloud finops is vital for various reasons. It is crucial in solving some of the key challenges like,

There is a lack of accountability and control over the cloud spending.
Absence of continuous cloud resource tracking and monitoring
Failure to implement optimal practices for cost reduction.
Delay in problem identification and rectification costs huge.
Loss of control over cloud asset growth as the organisation scale up.
Difficulty in finding the best cloud resource alternatives.

4. How Cloud Service Providers help in Cloud Cost Optimization?

CSPs do give us a lot of options through which we can realize considerable savings.

Pay-as-You-Go Pricing: Cloud services often follow a pay-as-you-go model, allowing users to pay only for the resources they consume. This flexibility helps in cost optimization by avoiding upfront costs for unused resources.
Reserved Instances: Cloud providers offer reserved instances or commitments, where users can commit to a specific number of resources for a term, often at a discounted rate compared to on-demand pricing.
Spot Instances: Some cloud providers offer spot instances, allowing users to bid for unused compute capacity at a lower cost. This can be cost-effective for certain workloads that are flexible in their resource requirements.
Auto-Scaling: Cloud platforms allow for automatic scaling of resources based on demand. This ensures that you only use and pay for the resources you need when you need them, helping to optimize costs.
Resource Monitoring and Management Tools: Cloud providers offer tools that allow users to monitor resource usage and costs in real-time. This visibility helps in identifying areas for optimization and cost savings.
Discounts and Incentive Programs: Cloud providers often provide discounts for long-term commitments, volume usage, or specific use cases. Additionally, they may offer incentive programs to encourage cost-conscious usage.
Cost Management Services: Cloud providers offer cost management and budgeting tools that help users set, track, and manage their spending. Alerts and reports assist in keeping costs within predefined budgets.
Global Presence: Cloud providers have a global network of data centers. Utilizing resources in regions where costs are lower or taking advantage of content delivery networks (CDNs) can result in cost savings.

5. What are the easiest ways to control cloud costs?

While there are many, enterprises miss to leverage some of the simple options available in hand,

Wherever possible, use reserved instances rather than pay-as-you-go instances.
Remove unused or idle resources by continuously monitoring the resources all the time.
Optimize the application architecture to maximize data ingress and egress. Ingress is free. But egress is chargeable based on the size of the data you transfer.

6. Is it possible to save money without compromising the performance?

Yes, a lot of cost savings can be achieved by continuous monitoring and optimizing your cloud usage for orphans and unused resources. Beyond reducing you can even witness improving performance levels.

In CloudCADI, we monitor for Orphan/Unused Disk, Public IP Address, load balancer, SQL servers, NAT gateway, Application Gateway, etc.

7. What are the trivial things that impact largely in cloud costs?

Well, there are many. They might seem small at the early stages of cloud adoption. The team’s focus will be more on the project, deliverables, and deadlines forgetting the fact that every resource they install/download start accumulating the bills either they use it to its fullest or not.

Examples are, leaving unused resources that are not actively contributing to operations, inefficient resource sizing, neglecting to properly tag and organize resources for cost allocation, etc. These can bring impacts like, wasting money on excessive resources or experiencing performance issues due to insufficient resources, difficulties in tracking and attributing costs to specific projects or departments.

8. What are the possible ways to overcome cloud costs?

Setting up notifications for out-of-the-ordinary spending or usage habits.
Optimizing cloud resource allocation for maximum efficiency.
Making use of rightsizing approaches to match resources to actual demands.

You can rely on CloudCADI for all these needs. It does a phenomenal job.

9. Finops Consultants or FinOps Tools?

The choice between FinOps consultants and FinOps tools depends on various factors, including the specific needs and circumstances of the client’s organization.

FinOps consultants bring in-depth knowledge and expertise in FinOps practices to the organisation. They can provide personalized approach by taking a holistic view of the organization needs.

While on the other hand, Finops tools brings multiple advantages, like automating certain aspects of cloud cost management, make the process less human error prone, continuous monitoring, detailed break downs and reports.

10. Why FinOps is an organization wide practice?

We always insist this to our customers. FinOps is not constrained to the cloud engineering division, it’s an organization wide cross functional collaborative practice. It involves all three hierarchies – engineering team, operations team, and finance team. Every stakeholder requires a solid information on the cloud usage, performance, and cost in their terms. So that they become accountable of their choices and can map it to their relevant goals.

Do you have any more questions? Write to us: Contact Amadis Experts

Authors

Tags Cloud Assets Management, CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION TOOLS, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS, CLOUD FINOPS TOOLS

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Why CloudCADI Should Be Your Cloud FinOps Tool?

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date June 9, 2023

Cloud FinOps products & tools are essential for enterprises to effectively manage, optimize, and control their cloud costs. They offer a plethora of benefits allowing organizations to make data-driven decisions, achieve cost savings, and maximize the value of their cloud investments. Let’s dig deep into some of its benefits.

What Are The Benefits of Cloud FinOps Tools?

1. Cost Optimization: They tell you where you can save.

Cloud FinOps tools help enterprises optimize their cloud spending by providing insights into usage patterns, identifying cost-saving opportunities, and enabling effective cost-management strategies. They allow to monitor and control cloud costs, avoid unnecessary expenses, and make informed decisions to optimize their cloud investments.

2. Financial Visibility: They break down your cloud spend.

Cloud FinOps tools offer financial visibility by providing detailed reports and analytics on cloud costs. They help enterprises understand their cloud spending across different services, business units, projects, or regions. This visibility enables better budgeting, forecasting, and cost allocation, empowering organizations to track and manage their cloud financials effectively.

3. Resource Efficiency: They show ways to leverage your cloud resources.

Cloud FinOps tools enable enterprises to optimize resource allocation and utilization. They help identify underutilized or idle resources, recommend rightsizing opportunities, and enable efficient scaling and provisioning of cloud resources. By optimizing resource usage, enterprises can eliminate wasteful spending and achieve better overall resource efficiency.

4. Cost Accountability: They turn cloud stakeholders financially accountable.

Cloud FinOps tools facilitate cost accountability by providing cost visibility to different stakeholders within the enterprise. They enable cost tracking and chargeback/showback mechanisms, allowing business units or teams to understand and manage their cloud spending. This promotes transparency, accountability, and cost-conscious decision-making throughout the organization.

5. Collaboration and Communication: They provide cross-functional collaboration.

Cloud FinOps tools foster collaboration between finance, IT, and business teams. They provide a common platform for discussions, cost analysis, and decision-making related to cloud spending.

6. Scalability and Growth: They align your financial goals with technical objectives.

Cloud FinOps tools support enterprises in scaling their cloud operations efficiently. As organizations grow and their cloud usage expands, these tools enable proactive cost management and scalability planning. They provide insights into the cost implications of scaling, help forecast future costs, and enable enterprises to align their cloud spending with business growth objectives.

Why Should You Choose CloudCADI?

CloudCADI (Cognitive & Actionable Data Insights) is an all-in-one cloud cost optimization tool that can supercharge your cloud cost management. From granular cost breakdowns to actionable recommendations, our tool provides the ultimate financial visibility and control.

While CloudCADI offers a wide range of benefits, we highlight three need-of-the-hour features that solved most of our client’s cost optimization challenges.

CloudCADI has Externalized Business Rule Engine (EBRE):

An externalized business rule engine (EBRE) refers to a software component or system that separates business rules from application code and stores them in an external repository or engine. It allows business rules to be managed independently of the application logic, enabling greater flexibility, maintainability, and agility in decision-making processes.

Some of its benefits include:

Business-User Friendly: An EBRE is designed to be accessible to business users and subject matter experts who have domain knowledge but may not possess programming skills. It provides a user-friendly interface to manage rules, empowering non-technical users to participate in the rule development process.
Agility and Flexibility: With an EBRE, CloudCADI allows business rules to be modified and updated independently of the underlying application logic. This promotes agility and flexibility in adapting to changing business requirements without the need for code changes or application redeployment.
Separation of Concerns: Externalizing business rules improves maintainability, modularity, and readability by allowing developers to focus on application logic while business experts concentrate on defining and managing the rules. It in turn promotes collaboration and reduces the time required to implement rule changes.
Target-driven approach: Business users have the option to set utilization targets and derive actionable insights & recommendations for execution. Like the traditional data center optimization models, this target-driven optimization using CloudCADI EBRE provides the technology team with the much-needed, end-state visualization before implementing the changes.

CloudCADI is Non-intrusive:

When an enterprise wishes to start cloud cost optimization with CloudCADI, all they need to give us is just a reader-level role for their cloud subscription. Our product starts its work right from there through the cloud service provider’s logs. Unlike other major cloud finops tools in the market, CloudCADI is agentless, (do not load agents), and exports any of your confidential data outside your secured networks.

A few benefits include:

Security: CloudCADI ensures the security and privacy of your cloud cost data. It sits within your cloud environment without any third-party external agents that require access to your sensitive cloud information.
Minimized disruption: CloudCADI identifies cost-saving opportunities without requiring significant changes to your existing infrastructure or application architecture. It analyses your cloud usage and spending patterns, providing recommendations to optimize costs while minimizing disruption.
Easy Implementation: CloudCADI can be implemented with minimal effort and configuration. It typically integrates with your existing cloud environment seamlessly. Within 2 weeks you can start optimizing your cloud infrastructure.

CloudCADI is Cloud-native:

CloudCADI is a cloud-native solution leveraging the cloud-native components for its deployment and functioning.

Some of its benefits are:

No additional compute: CloudCADI utilizes customers’ existing cloud services for its necessary data extraction required for optimization. Thus differs from many cloud finops tools in the market that writes separate scripts on the client instances consuming significant compute power and associated costs.
Agility: CloudCADI embraces the principles of agility, allowing for faster deployment and iteration cycles. They leverage containerization and monolithic architecture, enabling rapid updates and feature releases, thereby improving time-to-market.

Role-Based Access:

Not all cloud stakeholders require all cloud financials. While the business heads focus on the expenses overview for a defined period, cloud engineers will look for a granular breakdown that can lead them to the ultimate cause. CloudCADI has the flexibility to restrict or grant view permissions for users.

Self-Service Analytics / Dashboard View: You can grant or restrict user permissions to view cost summary, service category, performance, and/or highly utilized resources as per the user. For example, resources’ performance and highly utilized resources chart alone could be given to engineers who handle restructuring.

Advisor recommendations: This is our key feature that allows users to start optimizing almost immediately with multiple choices. This makes it more valuable to engineers rather than the CIOs. You can make this read-only access for them, so they focus on what is required.

Settings: You even have the facility to restrict CloudCADI usage settings like the cloud account information, tags, and members according to the user. This allows you to protect your secret cloud account credentials, usage, etc. intra-organization.

CloudCADI Integrates with Service Now:

Enterprises use ServiceNow ticketing for various reasons like centralized ticketing management, streamlined ticket workflows, self-service capabilities, and enhanced reporting.

If you are a large enterprise with multiple disconnected teams handling ‘n’ a number of cloud resources for diverse set deliverables and using ServiceNow as your ticketing software, you are in safe hands.

CloudCADI can be easily integrated with your ServiceNow in just a few seconds. Beyond the visualization of your cloud environment, this paves the way to take action on the optimization recommendations. With this, the cloud cost optimization becomes seamless eliminating manual error-prone communications and efforts.

Start Now!

Are you excited about the above features? We have just listed a few and there are many more to experience. Reach out to us for a demo today. Start optimizing your cloud investment without compromising your performance.

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Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION TOOLS, CLOUD FINOPS TOOLS

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Modernization – Best Practices

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date May 22, 2023

In today’s digital age, businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their operations and remain competitive in the market. The cloud is one of the most significant advancements in technology that has revolutionized how businesses operate. Cloud computing has transformed the way companies store, manage, and access data, providing a more flexible and scalable approach to IT infrastructure. However, as technology advances, old practices become outdated, and it is essential to consider cloud modernization practices which in turn saves cloud expenses.

What is Cloud Modernization?

Cloud modernization refers to the process of updating existing cloud infrastructure to leverage new capabilities and ensure that it aligns with the latest industry standards. With the ever-increasing demand for agility, scalability, and security, cloud modernization can help businesses stay ahead of the curve. Let’s see some strategies for cloud modernization.

Use Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is another trend that has gained momentum in recent years. With serverless computing, businesses can run applications without having to manage servers or infrastructure. This approach can help businesses achieve greater agility and scalability, as they only pay for the resources they use.

Serverless platforms, such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, do not require any upfront costs or long-term commitments. You only pay for the actual execution time and the number of invocations. This cost structure is particularly beneficial for sporadic workloads or applications with unpredictable usage patterns, as you are not locked into paying for unused resources. This reduces operational overhead and associated costs for system admins or DevOps teams.

Optimize Resource Utilization

Finally, businesses can optimize their infrastructure costs by optimizing their resource utilization. By monitoring their cloud infrastructure usage, businesses can identify areas where they can reduce their resource utilization, such as idle instances or oversized resources. This approach can help businesses reduce their infrastructure costs by only paying for the resources they need. Cloud FinOps tools like CloudCADI effectively do this and come with more exciting features like the one-panel dashboard, externalized business rule engine, and non-intrusive deployment.

Microsoft recommends three modernization practices for maximized cloud results.

Application modernization

Application modernization is leveraging technological advancements for upgrading legacy applications to improve their functionality, performance, scalability, security, and user experience to suit fast-paced business needs.

Different approaches to consider are,

Re-arrange:

Lift and shift your legacy code to modern technologies without significant changes to the code.

Re-architect:

Redesign the application leveraging microservices or containerization approaches. These technologies enable more efficient resource utilization by allowing applications to scale up or down based on demand. With auto-scaling capabilities, organizations can dynamically allocate resources as required, minimizing idle resources and associated costs.

Re-build:

Build an entirely new application using modern frameworks, and languages from scratch while retaining the core business logic and functionality.

Re-place:

Replace the legacy application with commercially available SaaS solutions saving extensive development efforts. Retiring the legacy applications reduces the costs associated with maintaining and supporting outdated infrastructure and licenses, while also benefiting from the cost-effective, scalable, and managed services provided by the cloud platform.

Process Modernization

Bringing DevOps methodology into processes is the best modernization approach as it brings together planning, development, delivery, and operations. Microsoft Azure comes with a lot of DevOps tools like Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, etc. that can effectively help developers to speed up their processes when coupled with the Agile framework.

Database Modernization

Microsoft recommends Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) adoption for cloud database modernization. Examples are, Azure SQL, Open-source SQL & NoSQL. Modernizing databases in the cloud allows organizations to take advantage of cloud-based infrastructure and eliminates the investment in expensive servers, storage systems, and networking equipment, organizations can leverage scalable and cost-effective cloud resources, paying only for what they use.

Conclusion

Cloud modernization is essential for businesses looking to stay ahead of the curve in today’s digital age. Adopting the above-mentioned best practices can achieve greater agility, scalability, and flexibility while reducing costs. With the right approach to cloud modernization, businesses can unlock the full potential of the cloud and stay ahead of the competition. Undoubtedly, it should be a continuous process for success at all levels.

SPEND RIGHT On Cloud.

Tags Application Modernization, CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, Cloud Modernization Practices, Process Modernization, Serverless Computing

Cloud Cost Optimization

How to plan your cloud budget for 2023 efficiently?

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date March 28, 2023

“41.4% of cloud leaders are increasing their cloud-based services and products – Google Cloud Brand Pulse Q4 2022 survey.”

Before we unravel the areas where our budgets drained last year, we are already in the mid of February 2023. The macroeconomic downturn has gone rigorous in recent months and is threateningly widespread. The sooner the enterprises figure out their business sustainability areas, the safer their cash flow. Cloud expenses occupy a significant portion of any fast-paced digitally transforming enterprises’ overall budget. This article will show you the ways to optimize your cloud budgets for days to come.

1. Watch out for the cloud trends!

“Hyperscalers will face a period of rising costs and lower revenue growth” – Canalys.

Public cloud service providers like Azure, AWS, GCP, etc. are expected to hike their prices percentage to compensate for the current inflation ramifications. If you are a cloud-native or a cloud-dependent business, ensure your team planned the 2023 cloud budget considering a 20-30% price hike assumption. Update your existing cloud environment with recent cloud modernization practices.

2. Stay focused on business goals.

In response to worldwide inflation, if you think reducing your cloud resources count might control your cloud expenses, you are in the wrong direction!

Understand the business purpose before you touch any cloud resource. For example, if you are forecasting a 10 -15% increase in your flagship product/service Q1 sales that uses VMs, trimming down the VMs count might land your profits downfall.

3. Educate every stakeholder.

Cloud cost management is a continuous process involving finance, operations, and business teams. Certain enterprises are still in the migration phase. It is vital to bring financial prudence among every team member involved in the process.

Example: If one of your cloud engineers has scaled out Kubernetes cluster resources during an app dev stage and left it as such in the production stage even after a lot of unwanted functionalities are purged, it would compound the cloud bills. Educating each cloud practitioner before adopting and updating them at periodic intervals on how they are accounting for the bills is crucial.

4. Historical Data is Gold

Nothing tells us better than the past. Bundle up all your previous year’s cloud cost, and utilization data from your cloud bills. You can take the help of your cloud service provider’s native data analytics tools or third-party tools like CloudCADI. You can get the cost trends for a defined period. By observing the cost spikes and valleys we could find the department, time, and resource responsible for what percentage of cloud budgets.

For example, if a project’s cloud resource utilization is at its peak during business hours and less or none during the festival/holidays. These patterns could help predict the cloud budget for 2023 accordingly.

5. Collaboration serves the purpose.

Success is a collaborative process. We cannot blame the finance team every time there is a cloud budget overrun. Get a cost estimate from every team for the following year. Understand the fact that it is difficult for a team leader to predict a budget as they are afraid of the wrong forecast and becoming answerable to the management. Educate them that it is practical and 10-30% variance is acceptable. So, we get a number to start.

Don’t forget – Cloud Cost Optimization is the Key!

“CIOs Still Waiting for Cloud Investments to Pay Off” – Wall Street Journal

Gartner forecasts worldwide public cloud spending to cross $592 billion in 2023. While the expenses on the cloud constantly rocketing, ROI is still under question for most enterprises. Cloud technology seemed like an economical option with huge benefits like scalability, agility, flexibility, etc. during the crisis. The pay-as-you-go model from cloud service providers further eased the organizations to migrate their on-prem workloads at a faster pace in the last few years. Cloud practitioners started enjoying the luxury of cloud resources without worrying about their impact on the cloud budget. Rightsizing, cloud tagging, discounts, etc. are inevitably helpful to overall business growth.

Remember, how smart and strong may be your cloud budget, if not utilized on the right resources at the right time and in the right manner, you’ll end in negative ROI and a cloud resource deficit that can harm your end customer.

SPEND RIGHT on the cloud with CloudCADI and have a blast in 2023!

Tags Cloud Budget, CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 1

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date December 5, 2022

Cloud containers come with the flexibility to lift and shift applications to any environment, cloud or virtual, or bare metal without worrying about the virtual OS, hypervisors, etc. Simplified management, paced-up delivery, and agility compel cloud developers to hail containerization. Kubernetes aka k8s (if you are wondering what k8 means, it’s just a replacement of 8 letters “ubernete”) is a popular open-source containerization platform cloud developers adopt widely. According to a recent report by CNCF, there is a 67% increase in Kubernetes developers worldwide which manifests the popularity.

The sad news is the surge in adoption and usage comes with a compromise in the IT infrastructure budget. Enterprises could be wasting nearly 80% of Kubernetes expenses on unintentional resources that are not helping organizations to hit their goals as planned. Let’s see in this blog what are the challenges and ways to optimize.

Challenges in Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Charged as a whole:

A cluster contains multiple nodes within. Each node will, in turn, contain a varying number of containers. Every node that is present inside one cluster is not necessarily part of the same application as others. Each node may be handled by 20 different teams for different applications. But the cluster is charged as a whole or clusters together by the cloud service providers. Billing starts right when a container is deployed into a node. The additional cost of $2.4/day is charged for Kubernetes cluster maintenance, software license, disaster recovery, etc.

Showback and chargeback – Near Impossible:

These two processes are vital for enterprises to bring financial accountability. (Showback is the process that gives visibility to a business unit’s expenses on cloud resources usage for a particular period but not charged. Whereas chargeback is where the unit is informed as well as charged based on its utilization.) Tagging, which can aid the engineers in cost tracking is not possible in Kubernetes clusters.

Every penny we invest becomes worthy when it checks the list of features/output we planned. When they just stay at the expense side mapped to no production, then the ultimate source for the anomalies should be identified. But it is not as simple as it sounds for Kubernetes clusters. Spotting the team responsible for most of the expenses is daunting as each container may be utilized by different teams in the enterprise working on different deliverables. Each team’s Infrastructure budget and resource cost allocation varies on the other hand.

Multi-cloud adoption:

In Gartner’s recent survey, 81% of the respondents stated that they use 2 or more cloud service providers to avail of various benefits like overcoming vendor- lock-in, resource discounts, disaster recovery, etc. Kubernetes clusters will contain workloads from different cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. which further twists the cost anomalies detection and Kubernetes cost optimization process.

Dynamic Autoscaling:

One of the key reasons for cloud engineers to choose the Kubernetes cluster is its autoscaling feature. Depending on the usage demand, Kubernetes scales up or down so the resources suffice the compute requirement during peaks and valleys. Further in horizontal autoscaling, containers scale out which may reach from 2 to 20 within a day. Kubernetes cost optimization turns complicated because of this unpredicted autoscaling.

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices

Let’s look at the optimal ways to trim the inadvertent expenses.

Quality of Services for Pods (QoS)

Kubernetes cluster offers cloud practitioners the flexibility to set different QoS classes to Pods. Based on this the Pods’ scheduling and removal become easier for cloud practitioners. It is of 3 types – Guaranteed, Burstable, and Best-Effort.

Guaranteed:

When cloud engineers need to have a Pod, whose instances are sufficient to handle a highly critical app, they can configure it to be a guaranteed QoS class. So, both the CPU & memory limits and requests are the same and set. As the name suggests it guarantees minimal resources (Requests are the minimum number of resources and limits are the maximum resources it can use)

Burstable:

A Burstable QoS class is assigned for a Pod when the vCPU or memory limit is more than the requests or not essentially the same. So, when the need arises for a spiked compute requirement, they can be utilized.

Best-Effort:

When both the limits and requests are not set, it is classified as a best-effort QoS class. Cloud engineers can avail for non-critical applications.

As we can clearly witness, Best-effort pods are the first choice for removal followed by Burstable and then Guaranteed.

Related reading: How to configure pods and containers?

2. ResourceQuotas & LimitRange

As we saw earlier, the Kubernetes cluster is shared by various teams. There is a possibility that one team may consume most of the Pods leaving other teams scarce. Namespace-level Pod restriction can mitigate this issue (Namespace is a virtual cluster). ResourceQuota is the means through which we can limit Pods’ usage within a Namespace.

Kubernetes administrators create a ResourceQuota for each Namespace. Whenever a user creates or updates a Pod within a Namespace, the ResourceQuota system checks if the limits are exceeded, If it is crossing the limits, it returns a “403 FORBIDDEN” error denying the action.

LimitRange is another policy that helps with resource constraints individually. As the name goes limits the range of “limits & requests” within a Namespace.

3. Affinity

Pod/Node Affinity helps in influencing the pod scheduling that helps in resource optimization and, in turn the cost. Even though the scheduler does its job of equally spreading pods across the nodes, for some special cases like, when an application requires a specific hardware or licensing constraints, we can use Node Affinity to schedule pods onto specific nodes. This in turn avoids over provisioning of expensive resources and kubernetes cost management.

It is not done. Looking for more optimal ways to cut down Kubernetes costs? Read our next blog here : Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices – Part 2

Kubernetes Cost management can turn simple when you use CloudCADI. Try a demo today.

SPEND RIGHT on Cloud with CloudCADI.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, controlling kubernetes costs, kubernetes, kubernetes cluster management, kubernetes cost management, kubernetes cost optimization, Kubernetes management

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud Cost Optimization – Steps to make note of – Part 2

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date July 5, 2022

Cloud resource provisioning took a paradigm shift from what it was before 10 years. It is now rapid and agile. Solutions like serverless cloud computing, and Infrastructure as a Code further simplify the scenario. Heavily consumed manual efforts are now redirected to core tasks. Cloud resource provisioning is no more a daunting task, but cloud cost optimization is.

We have discussed cloud cost optimization best practices – Part 1 before, let’s continue with the further steps in this article.

Step 7: Narrow down

Enterprises use multiple tools for cloud cost optimization. They prefer to stick with native cloud service provider tools for better reliability.

Example: Businesses using AWS cloud, can make use of,

AWS Cost Explorer – for managing and visualizing the cloud usage
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection – for detecting cloud spending abnormalities. This utilizes machine learning and statistical algorithms for accurate cost overage detection.
AWS Trusted Advisor- for recommendations on reducing costs, improving security, performance, etc.

Many other native tools are also available like AWS CloudWatch, and AWS Budgets that aid cloud cost optimization. Hovering over multiple tabs for information can complicate cloud practitioners’ decision-making.

Adopt a single solution that can unify all the results under one pane like CloudCADI that helps you to track, monitor, and restructure based on intelligent recommendations.

Step 8: Use Showback

Cost overages can occur from various sources. Overview of the cloud expenditure can only tell us how much we are wasting. Success of cloud cost optimization doesn’t stop right there. Identifying the source and rectifying the issue is the right way but it requires enormous effort.

Example: In Microsoft Azure, when we create a VM, a public IP address, network security group, and regular network interface is also created. When this VM is found to be unused for a longer period, the team decommission it to save the cloud costs. But if they miss decommissioning the other components (Public IP, Network interface, NSG) it still accounts for the monthly cloud bills.

Cost optimization reports should help us to filter it down and identify the lowest individual unit, the source of unintended spending.

CloudCADI can show you pod level details of cost anomalies.

Step 9: Map them

Every cloud cost optimization activity is directly coupled with the business benefits. List your business KPIs and benchmarks. Involve a stakeholder from every team like engineering, management, finance, and operations while figuring out KPIs. It’s crucial to map cloud spending with the business value it adds.

Example: Cloud spend per customer, cloud spend per application

This exercise will help you to deeply associate engineering activities with cost and make every stakeholder’s decision financially accountable.

Step 10: Keep in store

When you are aware of the roadmap and confident with the computing demand for the coming days, it’s safe to procure cloud resources well before. Bulk procurement in advance helps management on opting for better offers or discounts from service providers.

Example: Reserved Instances. AWS’ RI can provide up to 72% discount compared to “On-Demand” pricing. It also offers the flexibility to alter families, OS types, and tenancies when Convertible RIs are chosen.

Step 11: Go with the same

Before choosing the cloud service provider audit the internal environment thoroughly. If you have multiple Microsoft applications, it is good to go with Azure which saves integration costs. If there is a need for a short-term compute resource, go with a “pay-as-you-go” pricing model that allows increasing or decreasing compute capacity on-demand and pay for minutes (VMs) or seconds (Container instances). Whereas, for low latency microservices, and big data processing, GCP is a better option.

Step 12: Don’t let it rest

Cloud cost optimization is not a one-time setup to build and leave aside. It is an ongoing process that is closely associated with business productivity and growth. When the organization scale, cloud dependency increases piling up the cloud resource volume to meet the growing demands. The need for faster delivery, customer experience, rapid innovations, and competition foster organizations to less worry about the selection, allocation, tracking, and costs of the cloud workloads. Generally, they lock in with the existing cloud vendors for easier procurement and support.

Final thoughts

The steps stated above are just a few. It is not the end of the cost optimization setup. As we discussed earlier, it is an iterative process that is to be carried out each day.

Does the entire process sound so complicated? It is not when you choose CloudCADI. If you would like to know how? allow us to explain more.

Dial us today!

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, CLOUD COST OPTIMIZATION, Cloud Cost Optimization Practices, Cloud Cost Optimization Steps, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS, FINOPS

Cloud Cost Optimization Cloud FinOps Cloud Resources Management

Cloud cost optimization – Steps to make note of – Part 1

Post author By Sindhupriya Dhanabalan
Post date June 14, 2022

Cloud cost optimization is a practice any organization should adopt to ensure they SPEND RIGHT on the cloud. We have discussed what are the benefits of cloud cost optimization in the past. Let’s see what are common challenges in implementing the same and how to overcome them in this article.

Common Cloud Cost Optimization Challenges

While cloud cost optimization offer remarkable benefits, there are number of challenges that organization might face when trying to achieve the optimal savings. To mention a few,

Lack of visibility into cloud costs : Without proper monitoring and analysis, it can be challenging to identify areas where cost optimization is required.
Lack of expertise: Many organizations do not have dedicated cloud finops professionals or resources for managing cloud expenses.
Lack of continuous monitoring: Without consistent monitoring, organizations might miss the opportunities for savings at the right time.

Now let’s see one by one how to overcome these below,

Step 1: Arm them

Every cloud stakeholder should be armed with documents, tutorials, training, guidance, and tools to effectively handle the cloud environment. FinOps products should have the ability to provide graphical representation and reports on cloud usage. Reports should facilitate the stakeholders to dive deep into granular pod level, node level, business unit level, tag level usage, associated cost details, etc.

For example, our product CloudCADI offers reports and trend charts covering parameters like

CPU utilization
Memory
Disk Read
Disk Write
Storage Disk Read
Storage Disk Write
Network Received
Network Sent
Storage

These reports should equip the cloud practitioners with the necessary cost information for effective decisions.

Step 2: Herd them

One of the major challenges the enterprises face is cross-functional transparency. There may be two app development teams developing two different cloud-native applications without knowing that they both use different monitoring tools that satisfy the same purpose. Procurement teams go with a vendor based on the options provided by the cloud teams and better negotiation with the vendor. They have little or no interest in the usage of the tools by diverse teams.

It is crucial to identify these common requirements and consolidate the resources accordingly.

Step 3: Pivot on center

Cloud management is a tricky process. Cloud involves the operations team, finance team, cloud engineers, cloud architects, the procurement team, LoB managers, C-suite executives, etc. conveying a different message. Requirements vary from time to time. Organizations should have a centralized cloud cost optimization/FinOps team to mitigate the differences. Any cloud financial decision like buying new licenses, renewal, going hybrid cloud, etc., before reaching the CXO’s office should pass through the FinOps team’s scan.

After a thorough scanning of real needs and expectations, costs and business value mapping should be carried out. Once it is acknowledged, it should reach the decision maker’s table for approval.

Step 4: Analyze your cloud

Optimizing starts with analyzing. Review your organization’s cloud usage and spending patterns. This helps to identify the areas that needs restructuring or elimination and develop a targeted cost optimization strategy. You can either do this with a dedicated FinOps team or an effective cloud finops solution like CloudCADI.

Step 5: Retire the unused

There are resources that secretly weigh the cloud bills. Cloud practitioners set up auto-scaling to ensure enough capacity to face the traffic demands and improved cost management. Let’s consider Azure GPU machines. For high-end remote visualization, ML, and deep learning, GPU category, N-series virtual machines are ideal.

They accommodate low latency, high-throughput network interface for graphics or video-intensive workloads. When the engineers miss out on calculating the right number of nodes and configure in excess, the organization ends up paying for these zombie nodes.

For example,

Azure Instance NC12 with 1XK80 GPU offering 12 vCPUs costs $1.8 per hour. Consider 10 such instances counting 120 vCPUs configured but 5 left unused. At the end of the month, you need to pay $13140 instead of $6570 to Azure midst of no accountable benefits.

It is hard to identify these nodes until you address these in the line items of lengthy cloud bills. For larger organizations handling several applications, identification and mitigation go out of manual efforts. Options left with us are to manually plan and closely watch the configuration process, identify the unclaimed assets, and retire (which is not always feasible) or to go with cloud cost optimization products.

Step 6: Leverage services from your CSPs

Cloud Service Providers(CSPs) provide various cost saving options to facilitate clients in saving their cloud investments. Savings plans, discount on bulk scaling, reserved instances are a few options to make use of and realize significant cost savings.

Organizations tend to lose millions when they miss out on optimizing their new workloads along with the previous. Select a FinOps solution that runs along with your vision, each day dragging everything under one umbrella.

Keep optimizing. CloudCADI is with you!

Find this useful? Read Part 2 of Cloud Cost Optimization Steps here.

Tags CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT, Cloud Cost Optimization Practices, Cloud Cost Optimization Steps, cloud economics, CLOUD FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, CLOUD FINOPS, FINOPS

What is Azure Container Registry?

How Azure Container Registry Works

Azure Container Registry Service Tiers

Azure Container Registry Pricing: What You Need to Know

Common Optimization Challenges with Azure Container Registry

Best Practices for Azure ACR Cost Optimization Practices

How CloudCADI Helps Optimize Azure Container Registry Costs

Conclusion

What is Amazon ECS?

How Amazon ECS Works?

Amazon ECS Pricing: What you need to know?

Optimization Challenges with Amazon ECS

Best Cost Optimization Strategies for Amazon ECS

Key Benefits of Using CloudCADI for Amazon ECS Cost Management

Conclusion

1. What is Cloud FinOps?

2. What does Cloud FinOps do?

3. Why is Cloud FinOps important?

4. How Cloud Service Providers help in Cloud Cost Optimization?

5. What are the easiest ways to control cloud costs?

6. Is it possible to save money without compromising the performance?

7. What are the trivial things that impact largely in cloud costs?

8. What are the possible ways to overcome cloud costs?

9. Finops Consultants or FinOps Tools?

10. Why FinOps is an organization wide practice?

Authors

What Are The Benefits of Cloud FinOps Tools?

Why Should You Choose CloudCADI?

What is Cloud Modernization?

Use Serverless Computing

Optimize Resource Utilization

Application modernization

Re-arrange:

Re-architect:

Re-build:

Re-place:

Process Modernization

Database Modernization

Conclusion

1. Watch out for the cloud trends!

2. Stay focused on business goals.

3. Educate every stakeholder.

4. Historical Data is Gold

5. Collaboration serves the purpose.

Don’t forget – Cloud Cost Optimization is the Key!

Challenges in Kubernetes Cost Optimization

Charged as a whole:

Showback and chargeback – Near Impossible:

Multi-cloud adoption:

Dynamic Autoscaling:

Kubernetes Cost Optimization Best Practices

Guaranteed:

Burstable:

Best-Effort:

2. ResourceQuotas & LimitRange

3. Affinity

Step 7: Narrow down

Step 8: Use Showback

Step 9: Map them

Step 10: Keep in store

Step 11: Go with the same

Step 12: Don’t let it rest

Final thoughts

Common Cloud Cost Optimization Challenges

Step 1: Arm them

Step 2: Herd them

Step 3: Pivot on center

Step 4: Analyze your cloud

Step 5: Retire the unused

Step 6: Leverage services from your CSPs

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