Cloud Cost Optimization

What is Cloud Cost Optimization?

Cloud cost optimization is the process of maximizing the performance and efficiency of cloud resources to ensure that investments in cloud technology are creating value and increasing profitability. Cloud cost optimization isn’t about reducing cloud expenditure entirely; it is about deriving the maximum value from cloud investments. 

What are the different approaches to cloud cost optimization?

Cost cutting focuses on reducing expenditure entirely by focusing on reducing numbers in balance sheets – often at the expense of maximizing productivity or maintaining some programs. 

Cost optimization means optimizing performance and efficiency with the current resources. This is about doing more with less and looking for opportunities to better allocate resources and run them more efficiently.  

Value optimization focuses on locating opportunities for investments that maximize business growth. Sometimes, spending more in absolute terms can lead to greater returns to value. Often this is the result of unit financing, a staple of FinOps processes. 

Value-optimizing leaders usually achieve cloud cost optimization because opportunities for optimizing resources exist outside of current resources and expenditures. 

How can companies achieve cloud cost optimization?

To successfully achieve cloud cost optimization, companies must first strategize their cloud spending. Without a proper strategy, organizations often react with shortsighted fixes to deeply rooted issues. Three components of a strategy include. 

1. Analyze current expenditure 

It is important for companies to understand where they are spending money and how each component contributes value. Look at your current cloud estate and identify unused instances, pause idle resources, renegotiate contracts, etc. This is what we at Azul call the “low hanging fruit.” This step will reduce unnecessary spending. 

2. Create a culture of cloud cost awareness  

One approach is a FinOps mindset, which involves collaboration among various parts of the company to understand cloud spending at a granular level, the value of cloud spending, and empowering engineering teams to take appropriate actions.  

A second approach, establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence, guides company culture. The goal of implementing a Cloud Center of Excellence is to promote the lens of value optimization for business decisions. This helps organizations realize opportunities for value creation.  

3. Cloud cost optimization through application performance 

The principle behind this is literally to do more with less; when resources are rightsized to demand, applications can work efficiently and are only deployed as needed. When running Java applications, it is important that the resources are designed to maximize performance. When applications are more performant, they better use resources. It’s a simple equation: faster code = less compute = a smaller cloud bill. 

How can Azul help with cloud cost optimization?

Azul Platform Prime is a more performant Java runtime that can cut infrastructure costs in half. Platform Prime turbocharges the performance and scalability of Java ecosystems with an optimized runtime that maximizes performance while driving down infrastructure costs. 

More performance: Get more transactions from the same hardware and accelerate Java performance, even as loads increase. 

More savings: Slash capital expenses for servers by as much as 50%, cut operating expenses for cloud services (with no over-provisioning), and drive continuous value. 

More happy users: Maintain consistent response times, reduce system stalls, and provide better services—all with less infrastructure.