One amazing thing that the cloud promises is a reduction in long-term costs by allowing you to run your critical IT assets on an OpEx model rather than a CapEx model. However, undertaking such a transformation means you have to deliver without affecting end outcomes. It can’t be stressed enough how cost control skills are mission-critical to your organization. Let’s dig in and explore the possibilities for adjusting your costs without compromising your performance.

It doesn’t matter what your role is. Whether you are a part of the finance department, controlling the budget, a business decision-maker evaluating a new project, or a DevOps engineer thinking of new functionality, cloud cost management is mission-critical. It can make or break your business. The limitless possibilities of the Cloud are leading to overspending - time reign in the beast.

Decide on the Right Tags and Implement Them

Tagging is our number one piece of advice. It works well, even if your environment is not well structured to begin with. You can begin with tags, especially mandatory predefined and cost-tracking tags for consistency. These allow you to run search and bulk actions after you have classified your resources.

Tags are strings of text that you assign to a resource that describes resource type, environment (production, staging, or test), project name, roles, business unit, department, cost center, instance number, and more. With those elements, you can quickly identify the high costs and their relevance. Cost Analysis allows you to share these results with the relevant stakeholders. Later, you can directly perform actions on a set of resources almost instantly, in bulk.

Cost Analysis enables you to set budget limits and alerts every resource-specific tag, thereby preventing accidental spending.

You Can’t Share Everything

Oracle launched Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that introduced the concept of isolated compartments within a tenancy. This allows administrators to separate resources per compartment in a hierarchy. Compartments and sub-compartments represent a project, a team, or any other group of resources. For big enterprises, we’ve introduced parent and child tenancies to simplify the administration.

You can track usage and cost by separating resources by project or department in distinct compartments. The best part is you can set up service quotas. They are a powerful way to limit resources to the team working in specific compartments.

Separating your projects into compartments and sub-compartments. Essentially, using service quotas is the best way to keep your budget under control and avoid staggering bills at the end of the month.

On the Cloud, Every Second Costs Money

Most business leaders know that the business benefits of the cloud are the capacity to easily scale up your resource, that’s the advantage of a pay-as-you-use model. The biggest benefit is scaling down resources when you don’t need them. On OCI, compute virtual machine (VM), bare metal, and even GPU instances are charged per hour – that is an important fact. As your commitment is annual instead of monthly, a lower month can compensate for a peak month over a year. This way you eliminate monthly costs.

What if production systems have to run 24/7? Other VMs like test or development environments will only need to run during office hours, right. Here’s the trick, keeping them running during the night or weekends is wasteful. Just by scheduling VMs to turn off between a certain time, every day, you realize almost 40% savings!

Exploit this flexibility that is unique to them and assign different schedules to different groups of instances.

How Much is Too Much Performance?

Cloud sizing is another question that comes up. The wrong instance size or type selection has a large impact on cost. DevOps has to make real-time decisions regarding the CPU, storage, and more. It’s critical if they want their load to fit their needs. You want to ensure the performance is predictable and has full parameter flexibility.

Oracle Cloud is Very Different

OCI offers predictable SLA backed performance by design. Oracle’s commitment is not sharing threads across virtual machines. That gives you the ability to predict performance and the confidence that, with 1 OCPU, you get a physical core with dedicated thread. It brings significant cost saving as 1 OCPU provides the performance of 2 VCPU.

Look at What’s Expensive

Start with what’s easiest to do and find ways to reduce the highest costs. That is the best way forward to lower your cloud cost. Cost Analysis gives you access to a detailed analysis of your cost in the cloud so you can focus on what’s important.

All your Databases Belong to Us

Oracle’s 21c Converged Database is a multitenant database. Container Database (CDB can be plugged or unplugged easily, and numerous data models workloads and development approaches within a single database can be accommodated. It runs in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), provisions quickly, and scales on-demand. Adding performance to simplicity.

This architecture maximizes databases that can be hosted on a server by 10 times or more. Obviously, this allows your DevOps team to increase productivity.

Here’s the thing, don’t stop moving your databases onto VMs. Go a step further by consolidating your database into a single multitenant database. It’ll give you the highest density, shared system resources, and a single data source for consistent analysis. There’s more you can do, just review your databases, prioritize them, eliminate the unused ones, and consolidate the others on this solution.

Your Cloud Provider Can Help

Deploying an instance and forgetting to shut it down isn’t uncommon. Tracking resources isn't always that easy, and especially when they are oversized, this becomes a problem. It's hard when you have to do all this by yourself. It's not common for enterprises to have multiple teams where there are orphaned resources bleeding costs all around the organization. Now the elephant in the room-shadow IT. This is another kind of poorly undocumented resource that cut into your costs. To avoid this situation, listen to your Cloud Advisor and integrated OCI dashboard and your Cloud Service Provider.

Automate with Stakeholders' Involvement

It’s been said time and again that creating bottlenecks is not the right way to reduce Cloud costs. Give your team the liberty to build what fits within laid-out blueprints and templates. Creating such policy blueprints upfront is worth it. After this, you can rely on the Notifications service for usage alerts or the Budget service for spending alerts. This way, all the stakeholders receive alerts by email, Slack, PagerDuty, or a Jira ticket automatically.

The key is sharing information transparently with your broader team. This way you generate more involvement from the stakeholders. This self-service paradigm puts them in a position to take the right corrective action.

Go Cloud-native with Containers

The first step of all transformations is to lift-and-shift your application to the cloud and benefit from immediate cost savings. Or the next best thing is to refactor your application to go from your monolithic to a fully containerized application based on microservices. These serverless services are created on the spot to run your code and then terminated when done.

The thing is, containerization decreases your cloud bill, accelerates deployment, and unleashes team productivity.

Optimize your Oracle Cloud with Cloud4C

When you think about lowering your costs on the cloud, the obvious thing would be to compare prices. Here's the difference with Oracle cloud. It has lower prices than AWS, GCP, and Azure. What many people don’t understand is that Oracle’s approach to the Cloud is fundamentally different. It's time to avoid Clouds that are constantly trying to nickel and dime you or lock you into their environment.

You’ll need to pay attention to those unnoticed complimentary services that go beyond computing and storage- they add up fast.  

At Cloud4C, we help you with navigating this complex minefield of adjustments. You can’t do this alone. We are here to help. With 20 decades of experience in taking businesses to the Cloud, we can more than just help. So, let’s talk. We’re here to help.