Cost-Saving Tips for Your Cloud Journey with Microtica

Managing cloud costs is still a top concern for businesses utilizing cloud computing. Last year’s State of the Cloud report found that 93% of the surveyed organizations were prioritizing cloud cost prioritization for their business. Having in mind that the report also found that organizations are spending more on cloud services than ever before, this is not a surprising fact. The overspending can be attributed to multiple factors, including the complexity of cloud pricing models, lack of cloud usage visibility, and nonexistent/ineffective cost management strategies.

Optimizing cloud costs is crucial for businesses that want to remain competitive and financially stable. By identifying opportunities for cost savings and reducing unnecessary spending, your business can allocate resources more efficiently and increase overall profitability. In addition, managing cloud costs effectively improves transparency and accountability, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions about their cloud usage.
Having a comprehensive approach to cloud cost management is fundamental for cost optimization. This includes monitoring cloud usage, identifying opportunities for cost-saving, and automating actions and processes to eliminate waste.

In this article, we will explore five ways in which Microtica can help businesses achieve cost savings in the cloud.

1. Best-practices infrastructure

Microtica's production-ready templates and resources are designed with well-architected best practices for performance, security, and compliance. These templates are optimized for specific cloud providers (at the moment mostly AWS), and they ensure infrastructure is configured in a cost-effective and efficient manner.

Using these templates you can decrease the time and effort required to deploy cloud infrastructure while minimizing unnecessary costs, making sure that the infrastructure is configured in a proper way.

In addition to infrastructure templates, Microtica provides highly robust and scalable application templates. They may include features such as load balancing, caching, and content delivery networks (CDNs), which help reduce data traffic between servers, improving the performance of applications. This directly impacts the amount of time and resources required to process requests, leading to cost savings.

Microtica’s platform automates the provisioning and management of cloud resources, ensuring that businesses are using only what they need and avoiding over-provisioning. This can result in a significant reduction in cloud costs.

2. AWS credits

Microtica helps businesses manage their AWS credits effectively. AWS credits are discounts that can be applied to AWS bills, reducing overall costs. They are essentially free money that businesses can use to offset the cost of running their cloud infrastructure on AWS. By using AWS credits effectively, you can reduce your cloud spending and achieve long-term cost savings.

As part of our startup offering, we help businesses understand the eligibility requirements for AWS credits, and we can guide you through the process of applying. This includes identifying which programs or partnerships your business is eligible for and providing expert hands-on guidance on how to complete the application process.

After obtaining AWS credits, Microtica can continue providing guidance on how to use the credits effectively. For example, help businesses understand how to configure their infrastructure to take advantage of the credits in the best possible way, as well as identify which services or workloads to apply the credits to.

With Microtica, businesses can optimize their spending to make the most of their credits, ensuring they get the most out of their cloud investments.

3. More productive DevOps team

By using Microtica, businesses can free up their DevOps team to focus on more high-value tasks, which in turn can help with cloud cost optimization in several ways.

Firstly, Microtica automates many of the tedious and time-consuming tasks involved in managing cloud resources, such as provisioning and configuration management. This can allow the DevOps team to focus on more strategic initiatives, which can ultimately drive business value and improve the bottom line.

Secondly, by providing a centralized platform for managing cloud resources, Microtica can help businesses avoid the costs associated with managing multiple tools and platforms. By streamlining the management process, businesses can reduce the time and resources required to manage their cloud infrastructure, leading to cost savings over time.

Thirdly, by enabling collaboration between team members, Microtica can help businesses avoid the costs associated with siloed teams or inefficient communication processes. By providing a shared platform for managing infrastructure and applications, Microtica can improve communication and collaboration across teams, leading to faster resolution of issues and better decision-making.

Overall, by making the DevOps team more productive, Microtica can help businesses achieve long-term cost savings in the cloud. This approach can be particularly valuable for businesses that are looking to optimize their cloud costs while also improving performance, security, and compliance.

4. Cost Optimization feature

Microtica includes a cost optimization feature that analyzes cloud spending and makes recommendations for reducing costs. This feature works by identifying unused or underutilized resources, providing recommendations, and automating cost-saving actions.

The Cloud Cost Overview allows you to monitor and analyze your cloud accounts and services broken down by current and estimated spending. Using this information, you can identify areas where your business may be overspending.

Microtica also provides cost forecasting that enables businesses to estimate future spending based on historical trends, enabling them to plan more effectively and avoid unexpected cost overruns.

Based on the data collected by Microtica's cost analysis tools, the platform provides recommendations on how businesses can optimize their cloud spending. For example, it can identify instances that are running at low utilization rates and recommend scaling down or terminating them to save costs.

By following Microtica’s recommendations and actionable insights, businesses can ensure that they’re only paying for what they need and avoid unnecessary spending.

5. EKS Spot template

One of the most effective short-term ways to save on cloud costs is Microtica's EKS Spot Template. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a popular choice for managing containerized applications in the cloud. EKS Spot is designed to help businesses achieve cost optimization when running workloads on Kubernetes.

In its background, the EKS Spot template uses AWS Spot instances. Spot Instances are unused EC2 instances, available at a lower price compared to on-demand instances.

The EKS Spot template also includes auto-scaling capabilities, enabling businesses to adjust the number of instances based on demand. This can help to ensure that businesses are only paying for the resources they need, further reducing costs.

By using spot instances, you can save up to 90% on cloud costs compared to on-demand instances.

Conclusion

In conclusion, cloud cost optimization is a critical component of any cloud strategy, and Microtica provides businesses with powerful tools, services, and features to achieve this goal. By providing detailed cost analysis, optimization recommendations, continuous optimization, and actionable insights, Microtica enables businesses to identify areas where they can reduce cloud spending and implement changes quickly and efficiently.

The platform’s infrastructure and application templates are designed to incorporate best practices for cloud management, ensuring that businesses are using their cloud resources cost-effectively. The EKS Spot template is a prime example of this, leveraging AWS Spot Instances, auto-scaling, and resource optimization to significantly reduce cloud costs.

Additionally, Microtica helps businesses identify and apply for AWS credits, further reducing cloud spending. The platform's automated infrastructure management capabilities allow businesses to free up their DevOps team to focus on high-value tasks, while continuous optimization ensures that cost savings are sustained over time.

Overall, Microtica is an invaluable tool for businesses looking to optimize their cloud spending, reduce costs, and improve efficiency in their cloud infrastructure management.
To learn more about how to optimize your AWS costs and increase your savings, here is our Guide to Cost Optimization with 15+ practical tips that you can implement in your business.