Building in the cloud offers numerous benefits – from scale to latest technology to fault tolerance. However, we have all experienced the cost creep which over time can dampen these benefits and reduce the ROI of the cloud. Having managed 100’s of customer accounts, there are eight cost management “secrets” we consistently see that maximize cloud satisfaction when embraced.
- The 80/20 rule applies to the cloud -- 20% of your cloud services likely account for 80%+ of your spend. While pruning the underutilized resources is part of any cost optimization process, focusing FinOps efforts on the most costly services/teams will typically yield the most savings. This can involve simply applying AutoSavings for a quick win; but when combined with modernizing and architectural assessments, enterprises can quickly reduce a sizable portion of their monthly spend.
- Tagging is powerful but underutilized - well-structured tagging of cloud resources allows detailed cost visibility and optimization, but takes discipline and forethought to implement fully. This is often an afterthought for most businesses as developers often deploy infrastructure without contemplating their tagging taxonomy beforehand. Using automated tags is one part of the process, but employing cost allocation tags or standard tags gives the ability to map expenses to cost centers and better perform deep dives and correlation analysis on the problem at hand. While not directly attributable to savings, a tagging practice is a must-have for even the smallest business.
- Not all spending data is equally transparent - Services like storage, network egress charges, and discounts/credits are hard to get a clear picture of spending data with native cloud tools.
- Network Egress Charges: Cloud providers don't always expose granular billing data for traffic flowing out of their networks (egress). Often aggregate egress charges are lumped together, not broken down by source, service, or region. This makes it hard to pinpoint which workloads or components are driving egress costs - to the point admins write-off the costs. (Assigning tags to VPCs, subnets, gateways, load balancers and interfaces can help provide a more comprehensive picture)
- Storage: The billing structure for cloud storage tiers is complex, with factors like access and replication impacting costs. Granular line items showing what storage config changes led to what charges can be tedious to track.
- Credits & Discounts: Cloud providers offer a variety of incentives, committed use discounts, and reserved instance savings. However, the specific credit and associate dollar values are often vague. Some charges may just be lower without transparency into which credit was applied where, and you may miss out on aggregate discounts.
- The challenge of committing to reserved capacity - Significant cloud cost savings come from upfront commitments to reserved compute, but many enterprises leave these discounts on the table. Despite the availability of tooling to automate the process and eliminate risk; cloud administrators are still often hesitant to embrace.
The reasoning stems from admins pushing back on reservations because of perceived limits to their cloud agility and/or their unfamiliarity with tools for effectively managing reserved capacity. In reality, modern best-of-breed cloud management platforms have reservation automation that removes this bottleneck - allowing for automatic sizing, purchasing, right-sizing, and even reselling capacity based on historical usage and with AI or algorithmic precision to greatly reduce resource commitment risk. DevOps teams also worry that shifting to automated savings will reduce visibility into actual rates or application costs if the charges are stripped from bills. Best-of-breed cloud cost analytics tools have native integrations with discount plans, and can accurately report true realized savings, utilization, and return on commitment spend. While there is a slight learning curve, the benefits far outweigh the concerns.
- The rise of FinOps tools and operational best practices - Cloud cost management has evolved from manual reporting to automated real-time optimization thanks to an expanding ecosystem of FinOps technologies and frameworks. But one oft-overlooked element is the “Ops” component. Your operational approaches should implement workflows and procedures to assign, track and manage not only governance and security posture tasks but also those tasks around cost and spend management activities..
- Savings plan optimization depends on rightsizing first - AWS Savings Plans, Azure Reserved Instances, and GCP committed use discounts can drive big cloud savings, but blindly applying them without right-sizing workloads leads to unused capacity and wasted spend. Structured spend analysis and rightsizing should come before any long-term reservations. Purchasing a reserved instance with AutoSavings prior to rightsizing exposes you to reduced utilization of your reservations.
- Orphaned resources drain budgets quietly - Cloud environments inherently sprawl over time, leaving unused storage volumes, idle databases, zombie test instances, etc racking up charges. Orphaned resources are like a subscription tax few can avoid - public cloud vendors rarely volunteer the data showing what percentage of average customer spends comes from unused, orphaned resources that slip through the cracks over time. FinOps teams need workflow automation and resource inventorying to combat "orphaned" resources. This is the other 80% of your environment. Automation, with alerts on idle and unused states, helps manage the large swath of low cost resources.
- Anomaly detection saves big - some of the biggest infrastructure cost spikes come not from usage growth, but from outliers like crypto-mining malware, runaway batch jobs, or backend performance issues. ML-based anomaly alerts can flag these early. Organizations without anomaly tooling don't realize many of their biggest unexpected cloud bills come not from traffic surges but from outliers like those mentioned - even data pipeline errors or poor architectural choices can fly under the radar. Cloud cost anomaly detection using statistical models and ML makes it easy to flag these costly "unknown unknowns" early, and should be highly utilized within cloud operators’ weekly or daily tasks.
Managing cloud costs effectively is crucial for maximizing the return on your cloud investment. As we've outlined, these eight lesser-known FinOps secrets can help you take control of your cloud budget and prevent cost creep from undermining the benefits of the cloud. From leveraging the 80/20 rule to implementing anomaly detection, these strategies are essential for any enterprise looking to optimize their cloud spend and achieve financial efficiency.
Take Control of Your Cloud Costs and Maximize ROI with Bespin Global
If you're ready to take your cloud cost management to the next level, Bespin Global is here to help. With our deep expertise in cloud cost optimization and FinOps, we can guide you in implementing these best practices, ensuring you fully realize the economic advantages of your cloud investments. Contact Bespin Global today to learn how we can support your cloud cost optimization and FinOps initiatives.
