As the pound hits a record low against the dollar, your cloud usage will cost more. It comes as the U.K government makes announcements to reform taxes and create stimulus packages to grow the U.K economy. The Euro also reaches a 20-year-low against the dollar. This will mean you’re spending over 10% more in the last month and 20% more on your AWS costs than you might have done 6 months ago.
(based on a USD rate value of 0.76115 GBP End of March 2022).
At Devoteam, we believe that modernising your workloads in the cloud rather than using cloud as another data centre in the sky is a crucial part of a modern business. Modernising and optimising your workloads for cost is an important discipline to adopt in your organisation. Now is a critical time to modernise and optimise for cost with the pound hitting an all time low against the dollar against a backdrop of inflation reaching ~10% for the year.
AWS is a pay-as-you-go platform, but don’t forget that this is invoiced in arrears in USD by default and even if you change the default invoice currency to GBP, this doesn’t protect against foreign exchange rates. Don’t get caught out with higher bills in the coming months.
Now is a critical time to review your workloads on AWS and even if you have reviewed them in the past, this is a continuous process and we believe you should take action to minimise the impact on the current geo and local economic climate.
Some of the things you can get on with immediately include:
- Identify Amazon EC2 instances that have low utilisation and rightsize or turn them off
- Identify EBS volumes with low utilisation, by snapshotting and deleting them
- Analyse S3 usage and leverage lower cost tiers
- Identify databases with low utilisation and rightsize or turn them off
- Review networking and remove underutilised load balancers / elastic IPs
- Use Amazon spot instances to reduce OnDemand costs
- Use reserved instances or savings plans to save up to 70% costs
But perhaps, you don’t know where to begin…
If you’re not sure where to start, but you want quick wins, then start with a Cost Optimisation Assessment from Devoteam to help reduce your AWS costs.
Some customers have been through multiple cost optimisation exercises and have saved money by adopting good cloud economics practices; however, all customers reach a point where they need to modernise their workloads. At Devoteam, we believe moving to cloud native architectures, managed services, managed databases and open source technologies is a further opportunity to modernise workloads with multiple benefits in mind; costs, reliability, sustainability, performance, speed and agility.
Application modernisation using cloud native technologies, modernising your people and your operating model is the long-term sustainable path to lower costs and greener I.T.
The diagram below shows some modernisation journey types; some customers take a multi-step approach to modernising in the cloud and some customers refactor and re-platform as part of the migration. In either case, we recommend you also focus on modernising the way you run I.T, train your employees and modernise your processes.
Reach your I.T. carbon reduction goal. We recently worked with a client who was able to reduce their costs by 85% by conducting a Cost Optimisation Assessment assessment and working to modernise their workload(s) in the cloud.s simply by moving to AWS cloud, right sizing your environment and turning resources off when you don’t need them.
Technology improvements is one strategy to improve your business cost-performance, modernising and automating your processes is another important mechanism. Digitising manual processes frees up people to do higher value tasks resulting in a happier workforce. Examples such as automating a ‘password reset’ or ‘server / environment provisioning’ or self-service help through a modern cloud first contact centre can lead to up to 80% compared to a traditional contact centre solution that can scale to meet your customers’ expanding demands.
Finally, migrating to the cloud can help you reduce your overall costs by up to 60%, but you can also reduce your carbon footprint by up to 80%. Sustainability optimisations typically go hand-in-hand with cost optimisation; by turning resources off that you don’t need, running I.T only when it is required through serverless and managed services as well as optimising your code and your solutions.
At Devoteam, we can work with you to carry out Cost Optimisation Assessment Assessments and Well-Architected Assessments, to make sure you’re only paying for what you need, when you need it. We will help you with the quick wins, but we will also help you modernise in the cloud to get the broader value proposition of AWS.
At Devoteam, we’re only a phone call or LinkedIn message away and we’re ready to help you get started with 1) A Well Architected Review, 2) Cost Optimisation Assessment, 3) A Migration Assessment or a deep dive discussion to modernise your workloads.
Contact us to run an AWS Well Architected Review, Migration Assessment or a Cost Optimisation Assessment on your workloads with our experts at Devoteam.
If you would like more information on AWS cost optimisation, being well architected or modernising your workloads, contact us.