Cloud Cost Optimization - Top Approaches and Maestro Solutions

Managing cloud costs effectively becomes increasingly important, as cloud services usage grows, with public cloud spending expected to reach $805 billion by 2025. 

Cloud cost optimization involves controlling spending to maximize efficiency and value from investments. The Flexera 2024 State of the Cloud Report shows that 75% of organizations report increased cloud waste, with about 32% of budgets underutilized. This highlights challenges in visibility and resource management. Adopting best practices in cloud cost management is vital for companies to efficiently streamline and control their cloud expenses.

In this blog post, we would like to summarize the recent Top Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices article, and highlight how Maestro, and the tools it is integrated with, help with the challenge.

What is Cloud Cost Optimization?

Cloud cost optimization is the practice of reducing overall cloud spending by identifying mismanaged resources, eliminating waste, and efficiently allocating cloud resources. It involves understanding how cloud resources are being used and finding ways to make them more efficient and cost-effective. This practice is crucial since cloud environments can easily become expensive if not optimally managed due to their scalable nature.

According to Gartner's Guidance Framework for Managing and Optimizing the Costs of public IaaS and PaaS, optimization includes the following stages:



(as a reminder: you can find out more about each stage and how Maestro can be helpful on it - in this series of posts) 

There are several core principles behind the cloud cost optimization, following which makes the process maximally efficient. These include resource rightsizing to match the demand and the actual load, ensuring effective resource allocation, enabling cost visibility and accountability by introducing effective tagging and monitoring strategies, as well as auto scaling and automatic lifecycle management for dynamic resource adjustment to demand.

Maestro and Related Solutions for Cloud Cost Optimization

Maestro as a cloud management platform, together with other solutions closely integrated with it, provide wide range of capabilities in different aspects of cloud cost optimization.

Cost Monitoring and Management

Tracking and managing costs are essential for controlling expenses and maximizing the efficiency of cloud infrastructures. In multi-cloud infrastructures, the complexity increases as various services and pricing models across different platforms demand more sophisticated management approaches.

It is also highly important to regularly review your financial KPIs to detect anomalies and unexpected costs, focusing on high-cost areas such as cloud computing, storage costs, databases, and end-user computing.  This is how you can detect unexpected charges timely and address them properly.

Maestro is effectively addressing these challenges, by providing centralized management, a unified view of all cloud expenses (for AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, VMware) and simplifying operational complexities.



You can also find more information on Maestro capabilities in FinOps and Cloud cost management, by investigating this blog's FinOps label.

Resource Optimization

A strategic approach to effective resource management involves regularly auditing the cloud environment to identify and decommission underused or idle resources, which results in eliminating unnecessary cloud costs.

The resource review includes analyzing their workload against actual capacity to see if any optimization is needed. For some cases, scaling resource up or down can be a good solution, to make sure that no over- or underpovisioning is taking place. The solution can also be in splitting or combining loads, or migrating the resources to other types, families, or alternative services. 

EPAM Syndicate RightSizer allow establishing this processes effectively, and get the quick result — all to bring maximum performance for the most reasonable cost.



When integrated with Maestro, it allows users not only to get well-structured convenient reports, all inheriting classic maestro reports features, but also displays recommendations and details to Maestro UI.



Compliance Enablement

Compliance and benchmarking are essential in FinOps, as they allow to manage and optimize cloud expenditures effectively. 

Compliance ensures that a company meets necessary legal and regulatory requirements, helping to avoid penalties and maintain a reputable brand image. It also controls financial risks by enforcing adherence to budgets and financial guidelines, preventing overspending. 

Benchmarking, compares one's business performance to industry standards or peers, identifies inefficiencies and opportunities for cost reduction. It provides critical insights that aid in making informed decisions about resource investment and utilization, enhancing operational effectiveness. Furthermore, benchmarking drives continual improvement by pushing companies to adapt efficient practices used by others, ensuring competitive parity.

Both compliance and benchmarking enhance transparency and accountability in financial operations, crucial for maintaining stakeholder trust. Together, they mitigate risks and ensure that the financial operations align with strategic corporate goals, thereby optimizing cloud investments and overall business performance.

EPAM Syndicate Rule Engine can be a great help in performing complex evaluation of infrastructure against benchmarks and KPIs. It provides a thorough assessment of infrastructure based on various standards, requirements, and rules addressing security, compliance, utilization, and cost-effectiveness, aligning with globally recognized standards such as GDPR, PCI DSS, and the CIS benchmark, among others. 

Additionally, it supports rule customization and the ability to create your own rule sets. This flexibility ensures the assessment can be tailored to meet the unique needs of specific businesses, making it a highly adaptable solution for infrastructure evaluation.

Similarly to the RightSizer, when integrated with Maestro, it enables transparent clear reporting and findings visibility.




As a Conclusion

Cloud Cost Optimization is a complex task, that needs many aspects and areas to be taken in account to reach necessary efficiency.

Nowadays, there are numerous tools that simplify the task, and provide users with automated reviews, monitoring, analytics, and recommendations.

Maestro, and its closely integrated tools, such as Syndicate Rule Engine and Syndicate RightSizer, is a great choice for implementing an effective Cloud Cost Optimization practice into your infrastructure.


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