Making the Most of a Cloudy Forecast
Optimize cloud spending and embrace hybrid strategies for efficient computing in tightening budgets.
Navigate cloud cost challenges with insights from Dori Exterman, Chief Evangelist at Incredibuild. Discover how to maximize computing efficiency amidst tightening budgets in the tech landscape.
Public cloud spend is expected to reach nearly $600 billion this year. But with an abundance of economic uncertainties forcing business leaders across industries to tighten budgets, tech companies are pressured to make every cent spent on cloud tools count – some even reconsidering their cloud posture altogether.
But reverting to on-prem computing is not an option – it would be both cumbersome and counterproductive, especially for companies that have already spent the initial capital transitioning their computing needs to the cloud.
In truth, cloud costs aren’t much higher than when the cloud transformation was just underway. But they are under far more scrutiny.
To navigate budgeting without compromising on computing capabilities, cloud-reliant managers and team leads must be able to articulate to leadership the advantages of maintaining cloud operations – particularly for R&D – and how to do so without breaking the bank.
Pinpointing Cloud Advantages
With volatile markets, organizations must be prepared to scale up or down at a moment’s notice. The cloud provides the flexibility to do just that, enabling teams to navigate non-cloud-related budget cuts and reconfigurations more swiftly. With ongoing pressure on teams to maintain high performance even amid hiring freezes and downsizing – intelligent utilization of cloud-based DevOps services and automation make workflows more efficient.
The cloud also provides an optimal means of freeing organizations from pre-committing to on-prem hardware, which demands time, resources, and often high costs. Maintenance alone could prove cost-prohibitive if a company requires one hundred servers for an on-prem environment.
Therefore, if a company isn’t seeing the yield they expected from the cloud, they should first reassess their cloud tools and budget allotments, ensuring that they’ve taken the right measures to optimize the ROI of their cloud transition efforts. After all, they probably had a compelling reason to move to the cloud in the first place.
See More: AI & Automation: The Cornerstone of Cloud Investments in 2024
Don’t Ditch the Cloud – Leverage its Strengths
Given that cost has become one of the greatest challenges in today’s cloud environment, development team leaders must be able to justify their organization’s cloud journey, particularly regarding ROI and alignment with company strategy. Fortunately, several ways exist to address cloud spending while enhancing observability and overall efficiency.
Another approach is to move smaller or isolated compute tasks on-prem while allowing those tasks to auto-scale to the cloud during peak demand. Autoscaling saves time and money, sparing teams the need to overprovision cloud resources to meet predicted build times or worry about zombie compute – networks compromised by hacking or viruses.
Applying caching technologies can also have a dramatic impact both on performance and cloud compute consumption. For example, Amazon’s ElastiCache for Redis helped one company reduce cloud compute costs by 90%. In cluster mode, the load balance was better distributed, eliminating almost all downtime.
Perhaps most importantly, utilizing dashboards and reporting for all cloud processes can be highly useful as increased visibility means enhanced planning and predictability capabilities. When companies can see precisely how their money and resources are allocated, dev leaders can focus on the tasks generating the highest ROI. Tracking how much time and, in turn, money has been saved allows teams to reallocate resources when it comes time to scale and ensures cloud costs are allocated effectively, minimizing waste. This is not a one-and-done salve but requires a continuous self-assessment and real-time adjustment process. Effective visibility practices often uncover a lot of low-hanging fruit that can provide value to the company.
Embracing the Hybrid Transformation
Whatever the reason for delayed cloud migration, companies working on-prem are unlikely to completely shift to the cloud – at least not right now. Those companies should instead consider a hybrid model that allows them to stay on-prem and burst into the cloud when needed – or use managed cloud services for their CI and autoscale to use their idle on-prem compute. The healthcare industry has been particularly adept at adopting this model, with hospitals already running storage and compute on-prem with cloud capabilities available when needed – allowing them to store data in the cloud without migrating all workloads.
A hybrid approach wherein teams maintain an on-prem toolchain while relying on the cloud for overall computing needs would resolve many of the dilemmas developers encounter. For instance, moving or scaling 24/7 workloads such as performance testing scenarios to on-prem first, assuming available capacity, would decrease cloud costs while maintaining the benefits of managed cloud services. This approach aims to distribute computing to move between the cloud and idle on-prem resources seamlessly. The hybrid cloud approach has been shown to reduce power requirements: Kinetic IT could move from 10-20 kilowatts to 6 kilowatts per rack of IT equipment, reducing operational costs and environmental impact.
While beneficial in the long run, a hybrid strategy still requires much effort. Therefore, teams should employ self-serve products and services that minimize friction between on-prem processes and the cloud and enable greater ROI through flexible cloud usage. It’s a crucial balance when optimizing compute budgets on or off the cloud.
Keep Cloud Strategy Grounded
Even when pinched budgets make it tempting to revert to on-prem, optimizing cloud operations is simply more practical and efficient.
Amidst budget pressures, embracing efficient cloud strategies is imperative. Companies must balance costs, optimize computing, and consider hybrid models to maximize benefits. Navigating uncertainties requires a strategic approach, ensuring the continued relevance and advantage of cloud computing in the ever-evolving technological landscape.
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