How to manage costs when the cloud gets complex

Can complex cloud environments save you money? The answer, as so often in the world of tech, is yes – if you do it right.

All too often, enterprises adopt multi-cloud, hybrid or polycloud solutions with hope in their eyes and joy in their hearts. Then the invoices come. Things are bad. Very bad. What's worse, no one seems able to identify exactly where these costs have come from.

It doesn't have to be like this. There are simple steps that any business can take to wrest back control of their resources and cut back those unexpected costs.

Whatever the nature of your cloud environment, it's all about cloud cost optimisation. But the more complex the environment, the more complex the optimisation. For this reason, external help can be beneficial.

That's not to say it can't be achieved internally. It's just going to take time and money. Sometimes, it's far more cost-effective to leverage external expertise. Aside from anything else, a cloud consultant will be on top of the cloud's ever-changing requirements, challenges and opportunities.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before we gently blow our own trumpet, let's look at the financial challenges presented by complex cloud environments. First up: multi-cloud environments.

Multi-cloud environments

Multi-cloud environments are a great example of the chasm that can open up between dreams and reality.

The dream goes something like this. By leveraging multiple public cloud providers, you get to cherry-pick the most cost-effective services, saving you money and avoiding vendor lock-in.

That can be the reality. But too often, enterprises find that managing costs across cloud platforms can be an uphill struggle.

This is because pricing, billing and management aren't standardised across cloud providers. This can have the unfortunate effect of reducing your overall visibility of your spending.

Think of it this way. A multi-cloud environment is like renting each room of your house from a different landlord. Sure, it could result in cost savings. But it's going to take effective management to work.

One form that effective management takes is consistently tagging resources across all your cloud environments. This is a surefire way to improve accountability and make your cost tracking more granular. The more you see, the more you know and the more you can save.

It can also be advisable to automate cost controls. This can help you enforce budgets and spot cost anomalies before they snowball. It can also help you to scale resources according to demand.

You can also consider implementing a centralised cost management platform. This will give you all the data you need from all your cloud environments. It's the cloud equivalent of logging into online banking and seeing the money in your various accounts.

Hybrid cloud environments

Where multi-cloud environments use multiple clouds from multiple providers, hybrid cloud environments deploy a combination of public and private clouds.

In order to keep costs under control, you need to allocate workloads effectively. Needs vary from enterprise to enterprise, but as a rule of thumb, the private cloud is the best place for workloads that require ultra-low latency and high levels of security.

As with any cloud environment, you need to uncover and consolidate dormant resources. Features such as auto-scaling and load balancing mean you don't need to hold onto resources for a rainy day. Those underutilised resources are simply eating into your budget and dragging down your cloud's performance.

Visibility is all. You can't control what you can't see. Monitoring and reporting needs to be implemented – and automated where possible – to track usage and identify those parasitic resources.

You also need a firm grasp of your budgets. This involves regularly reviewing the pricing and billing of all your cloud environments. Are you going over budget? Are better deals available elsewhere? Without this regular check-in, you can easily end up overspending.