Skip to main content

Cloud Myths: Cloud is Cheaper (Pill 1 of 5 / Cloud Pills)

Cloud Myths: Cloud is Cheaper (Pill 1 of 5 / Cloud Pills)

The idea that moving to the cloud reduces the costs is a common misconception. The cloud infrastructure provides flexibility, scalability, and better CAPEX, but it does not guarantee lower costs without proper optimisation and management of the cloud services and infrastructure.

Idle and unused resources, overprovisioning, oversize databases, and unnecessary data transfer can increase running costs. The regional pricing mode, multi-cloud complexity, and cost variety add extra complexity to the cost function.

Cloud adoption without a cost governance strategy can result in unexpected expenses. Improper usage, combined with a pay-as-you-go model, can result in a nightmare for business stakeholders who cannot track and manage the monthly costs.

Cloud-native services such as AI services, managed databases, and analytics platforms are powerful, provide out-of-the-shelve capabilities, and increase business agility and innovation. However, they also come with higher operational costs that are not always properly tracked and mapped to the business.

Strong monitoring capabilities, resource optimisation, and proper policies provide a strong governance layer for cost management. All these practices are part of FinOps, which is supported by cloud vendors through different services and features.



Is the cloud cheaper? The cloud is a platform that requires rigorous planning and discipline to achieve full value and potential cost savings.

You can find below 5 examples of features of Microsoft Azure to achieve this:

1. Azure Cost Management & Azure Advisor for cost tracking, analysis and cost-saving recommendations

2. Azure Reserved Instances & Azure Spot VMs to reduce workload costs

3. Azure Resource Manager & Azure Policies for tagging policies

4. Azure DevTest Labs to gain and manage the cost of non-production environments

5. Azure Blob Storage Tiers, Storage Reserve Capacity & Lifecycle Management Policies for storage cost optimisation and storage tier patterns

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...

Cloud Myths: Migrating to the cloud is quick and easy (Pill 2 of 5 / Cloud Pills)

The idea that migration to the cloud is simple, straightforward and rapid is a wrong assumption. It’s a common misconception of business stakeholders that generates delays, budget overruns and technical dept. A migration requires laborious planning, technical expertise and a rigorous process.  Migrations, especially cloud migrations, are not one-size-fits-all journeys. One of the most critical steps is under evaluation, under budget and under consideration. The evaluation phase, where existing infrastructure, applications, database, network and the end-to-end estate are evaluated and mapped to a cloud strategy, is crucial to ensure the success of cloud migration. Additional factors such as security, compliance, and system dependencies increase the complexity of cloud migration.  A misconception regarding lift-and-shits is that they are fast and cheap. Moving applications to the cloud without changes does not provide the capability to optimise costs and performance, leading to ...