A cloud bill is likely not a one-page print. And if yours is, you may just be at your local CVS.
The cost-management homepage for Amazon Web Services features windows, bar graphs, recommended actions, summaries, and trends.
Such a data-filled view can be a “scary-looking dashboard,” according to George Crosby, founder of Cogito Group, a consultancy that tries to ease the fright and find ways for clients to cut cloud costs.
Crosby and Deloitte Principal Chris Thomas spoke to IT Brew about how to be ready for the cloud check when it arrives.
Use it or lose it! Cloud costs can include a variety of computing, network, and storage services. Crosby recommends searching a platform’s dashboard for top drivers and then drill into their causes.
A cost-management homepage prominently features monthly cost breakdowns, with colors for each service used: Say, the computing platform Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Services, or application-deployment tool Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS.
Let’s say EC2 costs are high. Crosby likes to use AWS’s filters in the “report parameters” panel to select EC2’s service and “usage type,” which reveals breakdowns for individual services. The EC2 usage-type list may reveal high “data transfer” costs.
When an availability-zone (AZ) outage occurs, an EC2 instance in that AZ shuts down. Some companies, as insurance for uptime, may have multiple instances and data transfers across both. A client should, in this case, investigate service-level agreements, to determine the need for the extra EC2 causing the data transfer, Crosby recommended.
Maybe the EC2 usage view reveals too many “on-demand” instances, and spot instances (which launch depending on available capacity) may be preferred—perhaps for build nodes that service internal users and not production environments, Crosby said. A migration to different CPU types, like ARM64 processors within cloud services, could also help to cut costs, he advised.
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Crosby recommended an org use cloud-monitoring tool to reveal a 30-day and seven-day history and identify trends related to amounts of compute, storage, and data transfer.
“Have we over-engineered what’s currently running in the cloud? That’s one way of looking at it,” Crosby told us.
Gen there, done that. A 2024 State of Cloud report from IT expense manager Tangoe found that cloud software led to average business costs of $2,559 per employee annually after analysing 500 US finops practitioners. More than nine in 10 (92%) respondents reported that their cloud spending rose.
“This escalation is driven largely by the adoption of AI and GenAI technologies, likely because of the storage and processing requirements of large language models,” the report read.
Developers may be running expensive prompts in loops, or failing to shut down GPU-intensive training jobs, according to Thomas, Deloitte’s US hybrid cloud infrastructure leader.
Practices like usage quotas, automated alerts for runaway queries, and training programs can help address surprise costs, Thomas said.
And, when it comes to cloud resources, don’t rack up a big bill at lunch time.
“Sometimes [organizations] might run the cafeteria website on the most expensive tier of storage, for example, when really the lowest tier is all that’s needed and you need to save the highest tier for your business-centric workloads,” he told us.