A Guide to Optimising Costs in the Cloud

Keeping cloud costs optimal is essential for the financial health of any enterprise. However, organisations encounter quite a few challenges when they migrate from on-premises data centres to the cloud using a lift-and-shift strategy. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) helps to mitigate these challenges and optimise costs.

- Lokesh Chenta

Organisations of all sizes have started moving to the cloud. There is no longer a question of ‘if’ an enterprise will move to the cloud; it’s only a matter of ‘when’. However, for most enterprises, the journey from on-premises data centres to the cloud is a Herculean task. One unwritten rule is that cloud migration should be seamless and invisible to end users. Additional challenges are a learning curve for the whole organisation, and migration to be completed within a defined timeline to avoid the dual costs of maintaining both on-premises data centres and the cloud infrastructure. Hence, most organisations follow the lift-and-shift approach (of replicating on-premises infra in the cloud) rather than trying to define all the infrastructure newly in the cloud. They also make some pragmatic choices and take decisions that prioritise ‘progress over perfection’.

Every infrastructure element and service usage in the cloud comes with an associated cost. When an enterprise migrates quickly to the cloud, and just tries to replicate on-premises infrastructure, cloud costs shoot higher than expected. Keeping cloud costs optimal is a recurring goal for most organisations, especially in the age of economic uncertainties and challenges. So, cloud migration is usually followed-up with a plan to optimise cloud costs by adopting the cloud-native approach.

In this article, we will look at various strategies that can be adopted to optimise cloud costs in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Cost analysis

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. — Peter Drucker