Hello and welcome to this lecture regarding Cloud Optimization and Cost Management.

Optimization and cost management is one of the fundamental reasons why many organizations initially look at using the Cloud. The great savings that can be achieved whilst optimizing their current infrastructure seems like a win win to many. For many this is the case, however, if you do not fully understand how to manage and operate your Cloud infrastructure, then you could soon see your costs spiraling above and beyond what you'd initially thought. Now there are a few things to consider from this perspective. Let's start by taking a look at cost calculators.

When initially working out your budgetary requirements and getting an understanding of what the Cloud services are going to cost you, you can find a number of cost calculators online to help you achieve this. For example, here are the cost calculators for both AWS and Azure.

These calculators allow you to select your chosen services along with any estimated or predicted resource amounts that you require, enabling you to get a good estimate of what your cost would be. It's only an estimate, as your environment will be ever-changing and the amount of data transfer will also fluctuate too.

These calculators can help you compose some of the financial information when presenting to senior management regarding your return on investment.

Once you have an understanding of what your costs could potentially be using the calculators, it enables you to better plan and be realistic about your requirements for your Cloud spend budget. Have these budgets defined, as they will help you maintain your spend. You may want to split your budget down between resources or services to have a more fine-grained control of overall spending. Some areas are likely to fluctuate quite a lot depending on demand whereas others will likely remain the same and maintain a more constant spend. And so you might choose to split these between different budgets.

A good practice when it comes to monitoring your Cloud spend is to set up billing alerts on your chosen Cloud platform which the larger market leaders offer and allow you to do. By doing so, you could be notified by custom thresholds that you can configure when your monthly spend reaches a certain point. This early warning system allows you to spot and identify potential unknowns and unexpected costs that have arisen within your architecture. Whilst at the same time, provides enough time to reduce resources elsewhere that may not be needed to help manage your monthly expenditure. This all of course helps to manage your budget spend and so I suggest you set this up as a part of your initial account creation.

To try and reduce your bills even further, you should analyze your billing reports to ascertain where your largest spend is occurring to see if this ties up with projected costs. These reports come to use to optimize your existing infrastructure. Perhaps one of your biggest spends is within the compute resource. You could look at ways of reducing the spend here by looking at payment plans for this resource type. Perhaps in the case of AWS you could purchase reserved instances whereby you commit to a resource for a specified period of time and therefore reducing the overall cost when compared to the other single on demand resource.

Another way to optimize your resources is to right size your infrastructure. Initially, you will create instance sizes within your environment from an educated guess and using performance metrics. And we'll know that will be overcautious. So factor in time to review your fleet instances from a performance perspective as your predictions may be way off once they start handling workloads in a production environment. You could potentially downsize a lot of your infrastructure to small instances and couple that with reserved instances in AWS and you could find yourself drastically reducing your cost. There are other pricing plans from a compute point of view so be sure to understand all pricing plans for each of your services as going forward you'll be able to fine tune and optimize your infrastructure. As a part of your Cloud migration strategy, you should spend time trying to get the best pricing solution available for your resources, however it's easy to upsize or downsize your infrastructure so it's not a huge problem if you need to adjust them either way.

If you intend to store a lot of data in the Cloud, then having a sound understanding of the different storage services could help you optimize your requirements from a price, durability, and retention perspective. Typically, the vendors will offer a myriad of storage services, each with its own set of benefits. Ensure you are aware of the best storage medium and service for the solution you intend to use. Some storage is designed to be accessed at speed whereby a high speed and read write performance is required. Other storage such as backups can be archived after a service where access is rarely required. The difference between the two storage options for this is huge, so be aware of the correct storage service for your data needs.

There are a number of 3rd party vendors out there who partner with some of the large Cloud vendors. Some of these specialize in products that can help you identify low utilized and redundant resources and suggest where improvements for optimization could be achieved with your environment. The Cloud vendors themselves also offer services to help with this too such as AWS Trusted Advisor. Be sure to look at the available tool sets to help you manage your fleet to help with optimizing your infrastructure. It would be a good practice from the get-go to implement and make use of these services as in the long run they could save you an exceptional amount of money by monitoring and suggesting cost improvements for you on your behalf based off a number of different metrics.

This brings us to the end of this lecture. Following this, we will look at your business continuity and how this changes within the Cloud.