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It has become a general trend for enterprises to go to the cloud. As enterprises have more and more systems on the cloud, enterprises spend more and more on the cloud, and the cost waste on the cloud is also increasing. According to a research report by RightScale, a professional consultancy, enterprise users are wasting as much as 30% on cloud computing spending. In the process of going to the cloud and using the cloud, how to optimize the cost expenditure on the cloud under the premise of ensuring and improving the business effect is a practical problem worthy of analysis.

The cost demand of the enterprise on the cloud

1. The value wings of the enterprise on the cloud

The development of cloud computing is in full swing. With its own unique advantages, cloud computing model is favored by the majority of Internet enterprises and traditional enterprise customers. A large number of domestic enterprises have moved their network infrastructure to the cloud. It is expected that under the promotion of the cloud, the development of business operations will be more rapid and stable.

Is cloud computing suitable for your business? Whether to use public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud? What value can Shangyun bring to the enterprise? Will Shangyun increase costs or save costs? These are several issues that every business leader will think about.

Internet enterprises and traditional enterprises have different demands on Shangyun because of their different business models, product forms, leaders' thinking and many other aspects. Internet enterprises mainly focus on high concurrent business for C-end users, with fast business iteration and high requirements for enterprise innovation capability. The primary consideration of cloud in business is the high availability, high elasticity, high security and strong PaaS capability of cloud, which supports the rapid business innovation of enterprises. At the same time, cost is also an important consideration.

While traditional enterprises often have their own computer rooms, the primary consideration on the cloud is security and cost, whether the data is safe on the cloud, and is it cheaper than the local computer room? Of course, due to the increasingly cruel operating pressure, traditional enterprises also hope to improve their business decision-making ability with the help of the advantages of cloud.

Generally speaking, both Internet enterprises and traditional enterprises pursue the value wings of business improvement and cost reduction, and the professional services of cloud management service providers are needed to achieve this goal.

two。 Misunderstanding of cost on cloud in enterprises

Although enterprises are very concerned about the cost of cloud, due to the lack of corresponding understanding of cloud computing, many enterprises have a certain degree of deviation in their understanding of cloud cost. There are two typical misunderstandings: on the one hand, they think that the annual rental fee for CVM is higher than the depreciation fee for servers in the local computer room, so they think that the cost of going to the cloud is higher than that of the local server room; on the other hand, some enterprises think that my system is on the cloud. The cost on the cloud will definitely be cheaper than that of the local, ignoring the daily operation and maintenance management of cloud resources.

The first misunderstanding is the lack of a clear and complete understanding of the composition of costs. In fact, when comparing the cloud costs of enterprises, local computer rooms need to calculate the total cost of ownership (Total Cost of Ownership). In addition to server depreciation, it also includes computer rooms, cabinets, network equipment, electricity charges, operation and maintenance personnel costs and other items. According to the estimates of authoritative organizations, the TCO of Shangyun will be much lower than that of local TCO, and as the user base of cloud vendors continues to grow, the rental cost of cloud resources will become more and more favorable.

The second misunderstanding is not so much a carelessness as a lack of detailed understanding of cloud computing, resulting in enterprises spending much more on the cloud than budgeted. The following sections of this article will analyze in detail how to optimize cloud costs. Try to provide some empirical guidance for enterprises to save costs on the cloud.

Cloud cost optimization system

There are more than 200 products on the cloud, and the architecture is flexible and diverse. how to give full play to the value of the cloud while saving and optimizing costs is a complex system engineering.

1. Cost optimization system

At the beginning of the enterprise going to the cloud, it is very important to lay a good foundation for the choice of cloud resources and cloud architecture, just like building a house. In particular, the planning and design of the architecture should fully consider the future expansibility, otherwise the cost of continuous repair or even overturning and reconstruction is very high. Second, after the enterprise goes to the cloud, the business may change, and the existing cloud-based architecture may not adapt to the business development of the enterprise; in addition, the products of cloud vendors are constantly iterating rapidly, often introducing products or services with better performance-to-price ratio.

Therefore, these factors determine that the cost optimization on the enterprise cloud is a continuous cycle process from pre-planning to in-process analysis, and then to post-evaluation and improvement, which is a constantly improving closed-loop system.

two。 Plan in advance-lay the foundation

The purpose of prior planning is to lay a good foundation, such as the planning standards for the upper cloud, the establishment of management and control processes, the subsequent selection of cloud resources, the design of cloud architecture and so on, and the non-standard operation of the system can also be effectively controlled. Of course, a key starting point for standards and process design is cost savings.

There are many things that need to be standardized, and standards can be set in four aspects:

From the point of view of the running environment, the configuration standard of the development test environment can be lower than that of the production environment, such as the specification configuration of cloud resources, for example, there is no need for highly available architecture, etc. The network connection of the development test environment can be IPSec * *, and cloud resources can be billed on a postpaid basis.

In terms of architecture selection, the cloud native high availability and high security architecture is used to save backup and security costs.

From the perspective of resource selection, avoid the use of overlapping resources, the use of low-cost resources, control of post-paid resources.

There are also skills in the choice of billing methods, such as temporary testing, flexible scaling, pay-per-view, prepaid resources for long-term use, low configuration first and then upgrade gradually.

The process is also very critical. If anyone can buy resources or start services at will, the cost can not be effectively controlled. When you really need money to buy resources, you may face the embarrassment of having no money on the account. Resource application process, resource change process, resource renewal process and resource recovery process can be established to standardize the application, approval and allocation of resources. At the same time, through the account management, authority management process, strict control of security risk and cost risk. However, the control of these processes may require the cooperation of third-party cloud management platform tools.

3. Analysis in the event-- reducing waste

Waste reduction is a key part of cost optimization. According to a research report by RightScale, a professional consultancy, enterprise users are now wasting 30 per cent of their spending on cloud computing. Some researchers even think that this figure is underestimated because the sample of the survey focuses on medium-sized and above-sized enterprises, and if small businesses with more serious waste are taken into account, the real waste of cloud resources may be higher, expected to be as high as 45%.

Enterprises should take reducing waste on the cloud as a top priority. We can analyze how to reduce waste from three aspects: cloud resources, architecture optimization and billing model.

From the resource level, we need to focus on five areas:

Too much: is there idle cloud resources? Are there any low-usage CVMs, unmounted cloud disks, repeatedly purchased WAF, high-traffic DDos bundles, etc.?

Counterweight: for example, servers with public network IP (including bandwidth) use shared bandwidth or shared traffic packets, or purchase file storage and object storage without special needs.

High: the configuration specifications of CPU, memory, disk and bandwidth are all much higher than the peak? Choose enterprise edition, flagship edition and other high-version resources? Are all disks equipped with SSD disks?

Expensive: instead of using shared bandwidth or shared traffic packets, each CVM is allocated a separate bandwidth? Instead of using SDWAN products, all physical lines are used?

Overused: the post-paid resource does not set a peak, resulting in the cost out of control.

From the perspective of architecture optimization, the use of object storage, backup tools of cloud platform, and the use of dynamic and static separation architecture, redis cache, auto scaling and so on can save storage costs, backup costs, bandwidth costs and cloud server fees.

From the perspective of billing model, we should focus on the following four aspects:

Temporary testing, auto scaling using pay-per-view resources. Pay-per-view resources are enabled and downtime is free to retain data and can be enabled quickly. For long-term operation, switch to prepaid billing mode.

Long-term use of resources, the use of prepaid resources. For prepaid resources, you can first use low-configuration resources, observe and evaluate the load of running resources, and then upgrade the configuration; you can lower the configuration of resources with low utilization, or release them.

For pay-per-view resources used for development and testing, non-working hours automatically start and stop, reducing unnecessary cost consumption

It is not true that the total annual cost of postpaid is lower than that of prepaid, such as NAT gateway, WAF, and cloud disks mounted on ECS. Choose the billing method flexibly.

4. Post-evaluation-- improving the effect

It is not enough to have pre-planning preparation and process control of in-process analysis, but also need regular cost statistical analysis afterwards. Analysis of cost details (by time period, by product details, by billing type), cost composition (by product category, by sub-account number, by organizational department, by project), cost trend (whether the trend is reasonable, important changes), the results of cost analysis serve as the basis for continuous optimization. There may be the phenomenon that the details of the cost expenditure are reasonable but the total cost exceeds the department cost budget, which is also unreasonable and needs to be optimized on the basis of analyzing the reasons.

Further thoughts on cost Saving on the Cloud

The above cloud cost optimization system may be microcosmic. From a macro perspective, if the infrastructure is stable, the business system is stable, the platform is secure, and the cloud platform supports rapid iterative innovation, if the above goals are achieved, it is also a manifestation of cost savings, saving the cost of trial and error of innovation and the cost of economic loss and brand damage caused by business interruption.

In order to achieve the above goals, enterprises need to adopt a reasonable security architecture and be good at using the mature PaaS capabilities of cloud platforms, such as micro services, middleware, containers, big data and other technologies to support rapid business innovation. Therefore, cost should not be equated with resources in isolation, but cost optimization should be viewed from an overall perspective.

Cost saving and optimization on the cloud is an iterative process, which requires regular analysis and continuous optimization, and should not be expected to be achieved in one step. At the same time, it should be noted that the goal of cost optimization on the cloud is to strike a balance between improving business effectiveness and reducing costs. On the premise of ensuring business continuity, security and scalability, we must not lose sight of the bottom line to optimize the cost on the cloud.

Author: gong Huabing

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