How to Do Effective Cost Management for AWS, GCP, and Azure
Introduction
Businesses utilize the three most important technologies—AWS, GCP, and Azure—for a large number of functions. All of these systems are essential to change the face of organizations and to mold them into something better. However, with all three of these technologies working, the cost associated with them is high
In many instances, you will continue to utilize the resources of these three technologies, but when the monthly bill arrives, you might rethink your strategy. Therefore, to prevent that from happening, you need to know the best practices to manage the costs of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. In this article, we are going to discuss and analyze the practices for effective cost management in AWS, GCP, and Azure. Start your 30-day free trial to gain access to over 200 self-paced courses.
How to Manage the Costs of Amazon Web Services?
Moving to such services is easy for many organizations, and they are tackling the problem of managing the costs that come up with it. Now, we are going to discuss the steps through which you can organize, manage and control the costs associated with AWS.
- Access the Costs Associated with AWS
All the products of managing the costs are available on an AWS Management Console, which you can find on the menu of AWS. When you go through this page, you will get familiar with a bundle of options through which you can manage your costs. Before diving into any other thing, we recommend that you go through the AWS Cost Explorer and let it analyze your account along with the resources consumed. This process will take about 24 hours. In the meantime, you can go through the rest of the functions or systems.
- Organize the Implementation of AWS
You may have a large number of accounts or projects running simultaneously using the resources derived directly from AWS. If you want to manage the costs associated with AWS, you need to organize every project or account on which the services of AWS are being implemented. All of your accounts will be found under the tag of a billing family whereas your projects may reside in the section of resource tags. The organizing of AWS in this way can help you manage all the costs better than any other idea on the table.
- Understand What Drives Your Cost
The best way to manage the costs is to understand what drives that figure in the first place. After turning on the cost explorer, you will see costs in the form of various tables or charts which will provide you with how much is spent on the respective resources. The usage of such resources along with the accounts which utilize these resources will be clearly mentioned on the screen. From there, you can exclusively interpret which resource or account needs to be handled and organized better than the others.
- Control Your Costs and the Usage
You can only control your costs if you put a limit on the resources used by various accounts or services. We recommend that you put that limit monthly to see how much resources are being consumed in the respective month. Whenever you exceed your set budget frame, you will get notified by an Amazon ANS or an alert. Once you create all your budgets, it will be shown on your budget dashboard along with the amount of the resources consumed for a given month.
- Optimize Your Costs and the Usage
The AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS budget, and AWS Cost Explorer help to optimize your costs to a great extent, but some organizations tend to purchase AWS reservations as well. These services help to save a large number of costs, approximately up to 75%, but you will have to remain committed to the usage of the services for about two to three years. To cater to these reservations, AWS provides a large variety of efficient tools that help provide information regarding cost savings to the organization and all the other users.
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How to Manage the Costs of Google Cloud Platform?
The demands of customers are constantly changing, and organizations continue to scale the services of cloud up and down to meet the constantly changing demands of their customers. However, the operational expenses always tend to go out of hand, which must be optimized by critically analyzing every aspect. That is why now is the time to discuss the practices to manage the costs for Google Cloud Platform and how this management can help to meet the needs of your business.
- Know the Tools of Cost Management and Billing
Cloud provides its services on-demand and if those services are not monitored efficiently, they will creep up on you and make large sums of costs. Therefore, you need to understand where most costs are residing or which projects are consuming an irregular number of resources. That is why Google Cloud has introduced a large number of billing and cost management tools that can help you grant access to the insights of such projects. These tools help you organize and manage your projects according to the resources used by such projects and then assign them with the correct figure.
- Only Pay for the Services that You Acquire
You may receive a large sum of bills at the end of each year which always leaves you bewildered. This is because you're not only taking advantage of the current resources but a large number of resources that you utilized already are still in the working process. That is why the first thing you have to do is get rid of such resources that are no longer used. Furthermore, the cloud provides you with the opportunity to pay for only those services or resources that are being used by the organizations. However, many organizations tend to leave things as they are when they call it a night. But this is what you have to avoid if you want to save some of that cost, and the best way to do that is to turn off the systems when they are not required by the organization.
- Optimize the Costs of Performance and Cloud Storage
There are many instances when your storage sections may get intermingled with that of the cost section. This may occur as a result of lower storage capacity or when the workload is too great to handle, and it can have a greater impact on the costs as well. Therefore, it is better to subdivide your every section, and Google Cloud has already made it easy for its users. Google Cloud provides you with various billing sections that include the storage billing section along with the cost billing section, which helps you manage the costs better.
- Tune the Warehouse of Your Data
To approach data analytics in a new way, many organizations are moving towards BigQuery. However, the services of such technology can prove to be more expensive than one can think, and that is why you need to learn how to manage these costs. First of all, you don't have to pay for the services you don't use, therefore, utilize the option of Maximum Bytes Billed Setting, which will help you limit your costs to only those services which you acquire.
Another way to improve the efficiency and performance of the queries along with reducing the costs is to partition and cluster your tables. All the tables can be clustered and partitioned based on the time, timestamp or date of certain queries. Moreover, if you partition your stored data, you can save up to 50% of the costs. All you have to do is to shift your tables to long-term storage that hasn't been a part of editing of any sort.
- Don't Forget to Filter Your Packet of Network
Monitoring your data is very important when it comes to securing all your operations, because one wrong thing can turn your organization upside down. But with the availability of on-premises environments of the cloud, everything gets visible to a large number of people. At this point, when huge traffic hits your systems, all of them will lose their efficiency and use more resources to complete the assigned tasks. Therefore, you need to constantly filter your network packet to avoid these kinds of mishaps.
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How to Manage the Costs of Azure?
Now, we are moving towards the third most important technology known as Microsoft Azure, which is renowned for its efficiency and performance. However, many organizations fail to properly manage the costs of Azure and end up being the victim of heavily implied expenses. Therefore, you need to understand the ways through which you can appropriately manage the Azure costs.
- Keep the Pricing Option in Mind
You may have to turn off the services of other technologies after some time, but this is not the case with Azure. On the contrary, the longer you use the services of Azure, the lesser you will have to pay for them in the future. Thus, if you use the services for about two to three years, the price of those services will be reduced significantly. All you have to do is select a certain resource and timely check the pricing option of it to change it to the updated one.
- Don't Forget to Resize Your Virtual Machines
A lot of options are present to choose from the settings of the virtual machines, but you need to go with that option which provides you with the most benefits. To optimize your costs for Azure, you need to run all the virtual machines to their full capacity and usage. However, this usage can fluctuate a little, but you can monitor the process of these machines on the metrics of Azure. The continuous resizing of such virtual machines can help you acquire maximum benefits and efficiency at the most optimal costs. By reducing the size of the virtual machines, you can cut down a large number of bills.
- Transfer all the Workload to Containers
Many organizations believe that virtual machines are the only computing power available to the industry, but this is not the case. Containers also provide efficient computing power. They are also less expensive compared to various virtual machines because of their proficient operability. Azure Kubernetes Service proves to be the most efficient hosting platform, and that is why most of the industries are shifting their workload along with the services to containers.
- Transfer Your Archive Data to Cold Storage
Organizations have large sums of data that must be stored somewhere, and Azure provides the maximum storage capacity. However, organizations tend to forget that they have to subdivide the data into two parts, the one which is in usage or will be used and the other in which used data will reside. This is because Azure has blob storage which consists of warm storage and cold storage. Warm storage contains the data that will be used or is being used whereas cold storage contains that data that won't be used any further. Make sure that you transfer all your archived data to the cold storage, because it is less expensive than the warm storage and you won't have to pay extra charges.
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Final Thoughts
Whether it is Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure, any one of these services is indispensable to bear fruitful results for your organization. Understanding all of these technologies is considered a necessity, and many people are acquiring this knowledge whenever they get a chance. Therefore, if you want to become a part of such technological advancement, you need to enroll in our Google Cloud Certification, AWS Certification or Azure Certification first and then move on to the other certifications. This is because these certifications will build a firm foundation on which you can add further knowledge, brick by brick, regarding other technologies. Connect with our experts to learn more about our cloud certifications.