| |JULY 20238CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONCLOUD COST REDUCTIONBy Norman Paulsen, VP IT & Digital, Lolli & PopsWhether it is Basecamp's impressive 3.2 million USD cloud bill or Dropbox's migration out of the cloud, there is a lot of buzz right now around the high cost of cloud computing. Go back just a few years and every IT leader was moved to or moving to the cloud. Now, you cannot avoid stories of run away bills or murmurs of moving back to on-prem servers. Snap cut computing costs by 65 percent and Dropbox by 74.6 million USD over two years by moving away from the cloud. When companies put up these big numbers, you cannot help but take notice and wonder: is my cloud bill too high? I have seen a good number of cloud implementations and I can say with some clarity, absolutely. When I joined Lolli & Pops, a mid-sized candy retailer, they had the same problem. As my first foray into retail, it was interesting to see they suffered from the same problems as the IT industry when it came to cloud costs. Through some performance tuning and optimizations, I was able to cut Lolli & Pops bill by 85 percent in under a year. We have even further savings that will be realized in the coming months getting us over a 90 percent reduction in costs. I am here to tell you that you do not need to build your own servers to save on your cloud bill. I will detail out a few of the quick wins that can drastically reduce your cloud infrastructure costs quickly. Knowledge is power.Become familiar with your bill. Understand how to slice and dice your daily cloud costs. You will be surprised where that spend is going. Important slices to know are spend by usage type, spend by instance type and spend by region. Usage type breaks down your spend into finely grained buckets including instance types, volume storage, gateway hours, etc. The instance type report shows spend by VM size. The spend by region report shows what zones your spend is occurring in. All of these reports help identify systems you are paying for that you are not using. We found several stagnant systems and resources we were being billed for but were not in use. Cleaning these up is a quick way to cut costs. We found systems running in regions that were not in use and high usage spend on volume storage for archives no one had looked at in over a decade. Understanding your cloud spend at a granular level is the first step to cutting costs. RightsizingThe next step was correctly sizing some of our servers. The instance report allowed us to identify our most costly virtual machines. Armed with that information, we knew where to focus first. We had a small subset of servers accounting for most Norman Paulsen
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