Challenges of managing cloud expenditure

Enterprise spending on public cloud has been growing quickly and significantly. According to recent surveys, companies plan to spend 24% more on public cloud in coming years as compared to past years. Ironically, while one of the main benefits of moving to cloud is cost savings, it can quickly spiral out of control and become a significant challenge for your organization. Here’s what this boils down to:

• One of the key challenges cited by enterprises is understanding the cost implications of licensed software running in the cloud. Optimizing existing cloud usage for cost savings will be a top priority for IT teams in coming years.
• Like any IT service, public cloud can involve unexpected charges. It can be noted that most of the cloud teams are not doing all they can do to optimize their cloud expenditure. Only a limited number of companies have implemented automated systems to manage the cloud expenditure.
• Cost unpredictability has become one of the main pain points for cloud management. A contributing factor to this is the difficulty organizations have in tracking and forecasting cloud usage. A report found that unpredictable budget costs was one of the biggest cloud management pain points for 37% of respondents, while 30% had difficulty with lack of transparency and visibility.
• The flexibility to scale up and down on demand has become a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is beneficial as companies can engage infrastructure only when required and save cost when not in use. On the other hand, if the demand is not properly estimated, it can result in over-estimation and underutilization of resources.

No wonder cloud cost management and cloud governance have emerged as top concerns for enterprise customers!

6 ways to manage cloud expenditure

Cloud cost management is not a fix-and-forget process. It is a meticulous and continuous activity that needs to be undertaken from the beginning. Here are a few ways you can immediately start saving money on your cloud infrastructure costs.

1. Identify wastage

The first step to reducing cloud expenditure is to uncover inefficient use of cloud resources. You will need to address key areas that account for the majority of wasted cloud spend and budget overruns. If you find resources which are under-utilized, quickly find ways to either use them or de-implement them.

2. Right-size your instances

Have a clear understanding about the resource utilization and performance requirements before you finalize the sizing for your instances. Oversized instances are one of the main culprits for overspending on cloud resources. Around 40% of instances are sized larger than necessary and could easily be scaled down without impacting application performance.

3. Set up clear budgeting and governance policies

Once your requirements are set, ensure that you have clear policies regarding budget and governance. Set budget caps aligned with your growth projections at organizational unit and account levels which will prevent internal IT teams from overspending. It is also advisable to have guidelines in place so that any usage goes through a proper approval process to avoid unnecessary spending.

4. Provide visibility

Teams should have a clear visibility into what they are spending. Identify which resources are being used and who owns it. Tagging resources with user ownership will allow the teams to track usage effectively and shut down unutilized cloud resources.

5. Clear unused storage

Evaluate what you are storing on the cloud. As Virtual Machines are shut down, the attached storage can sometimes be left running, which contributes to unnecessary spending. It is better to delete unused storage. Furthermore, shutting down instances during nights and weekends can also help save about 70% of runtime costs. Define which environments need 24×7 availability, and set schedules for the rest.

6. Select cloud region wisely

Review the regions in which your services are running. Cloud providers offer regions to help customers store resources closer to where they need to be. The cost of services per region can vary by as much as 60%. Ensure that the need of running services in a given region balances the costs involved.

The Bottomline

Exceeding set budgets for cloud is a common yet avoidable problem for most organizations. If time and resources are roadblocks you face while managing cloud costs, look to using a cloud management platform. You could also partner with a cloud service provider who can optimize, control, and manage your cloud spending for you.  Whatever path you choose, committing to a culture of cost management and optimization will be a game changer for your organization and your business.

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However, the success of cloud adoption depends heavily on whether the cloud deployment model is right for the business, as it will dictate how the business stores and interacts with their data and applications. There are typically three types of available cloud models: public, private or hybrid.

Public cloud

A public cloud environment is built on IT infrastructure services belonging to cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Users access the data in the cloud via the public Internet, which means that multiple ‘tenants’ can be using the cloud at the same time.

Besides the base fee, public cloud providers (PCPs) offer modular features such as application modernization or cloud storage on a pay-per-use system, allowing businesses to scale their use and costs as necessary. But as the PCPs control the features and service parameters, businesses may have a lesser degree of control and customization.

This cloud model may be best suited for cloud-native startups who need to scale quickly yet have limited resources and expertise.

Private cloud

A private cloud is exclusively used by a single business. The cloud is established within the business’s own data centre and can only be accessed through their intranet or virtual private network (VPN). This provides users with more complete control, visibility and customization ability, as well as enhanced security.

As cloud management and maintenance becomes the sole responsibility of the business, this requires higher upkeep costs and resource usage. This can be mitigated by offloading day-to-day monitoring and upkeep to experienced managed service providers (MSPs), which ensures that the cloud is well-managed and optimized while enabling in-house IT teams to prioritize other critical tasks.

Larger enterprises and institutions that require a secured environment that meets regulatory standards – such as banks – may prefer this cloud model.

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud is a single, consolidated IT environment that incorporates services from public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure, which are connected via local area networks (LANs) or VPNs. This may involve merging at least one private cloud and one public cloud, or even merging two or more public clouds.

The flexible nature of the hybrid model allows businesses to move workloads between clouds more easily and have more control over their data. Unsurprisingly, it is popular among enterprises and may be best suited for those digitally transitioning from pure on-premises solutions, but there are many variants of hybrid deployments to choose from.

Key decision-making factors

Cost can vary significantly by cloud model, which is why businesses must ensure that their chosen cloud aligns with their budget. Public clouds have subscription and hosting fees, private clouds incur maintenance and upkeep costs, and hybrid clouds have a combination of the two. But these costs can also minimize costs incurred elsewhere, so businesses must evaluate accordingly.

Data security and compliance needs are also important considerations. The private cloud model offers the best control and visibility but requires the right experts to oversee. Public clouds are compliance-certified but can be accessed by multiple users. Some businesses may also need to take local data regulations into account, especially those with multinational operations, when choosing a cloud.

Choosing the right cloud with the help of MSPs

Choosing the right cloud for your business can be a daunting decision because it is a significant commitment and can have a large impact. An experienced managed service provider (MSP) with the right industry partnerships and expertise can bridge this gap and help you make the cloud transition seamlessly.

At Cloud Kinetics, we can provide cloud assessment and consultation services to ensure that all your business needs are met with the most suitable cloud model for you. Once you’ve made a decision; we can even oversee the seamless cloud migration and integration of your systems to and with the cloud, as well as undertaking other cloud-managed services based on your requirements. Speak to us today.

The post How To Choose Between Public, Private And Hybrid Clouds appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Security is not only about encrypting the data at rest and data in flight. There are many other layers to consider – network layer design security, users who are going to admin/develop on cloud their permission levels, securing the application from bad bots, SQL injection at scale etc. All these are a part of the overall security posture.

A shared security model is one in which security of the cloud is the cloud provider’s responsibility and security in the cloud is the user’s responsibility. That is, physical hardware, geography, Infrastructure, authorized employee access etc. are the responsibility of the cloud provider. On the other hand, there are services which need to be enabled in the design architecture to achieve security in the cloud.

Cloud Infrastructure with AWS Event-Driven Security

AWS is driving security at different layers, with innovative security services that are shifting toward event-driven calls to action. Combining a few services from AWS, an event-driven security posture can be built for your AWS account. These services include:

• CloudTrail: Repository for logging All API’s Call W
• CloudWatch: Especially Cloud Watch Events
• Event Bridge: Cloud Watch Events V2
• Guard Duty: A Cloud-based IDS
• Macie: ML based Data Leak Protection
• AWS Config: Assets History Manager
• WAF: Serverless Layer 7 Firewall Service
• Security Hub: One-stop shop for Entire Account Security

All the above have play a role at different levels and a few of them may be combined to make a cloud native event-driven security architecture.

One of the most important layer, which can also be one of the weakest links in any organization, is “Users”. AWS provides IAM Services which is a User/Group/Permission store place. IAM provides Managed Policies, a set of permissions assigned to a User or Group. One concern can be that it could be very wide, exposing certain services to a user who is not supposed to take action or when the infrastructure belongs to another department of an organization. We recommend using Cloudtrail along with Cloudwatch Events to strengthen the security of IAM access in real time.

Let us cover each service in detail:

CloudTrail

Whatever we do in Cloud, under-the-hood, it is calling APIs of that service to perform the action. CloudTrail is the AWS service that records all the calls and can be queried to review actions. Logs can be stored in S3 for long-term retention, which helps for Audit and compliance purposes.

Cloudtrail integrates with CloudWatch Events to enable Event-driven security and quick calls to action, which may only be notification to relevant stakeholders or auto remediation of that action which can triggered by Lambda function.

Important thing to note is that Cloudtrail does not publish logs in real time so using CloudWatch Events, it is now possible to monitor specific API calls that occurred in account to take action.

Cloud Watch Events and Event Bridge

I want to cover both because although the underlying API is the same, Event Bridge is a new version of CloudWatch events. The idea of this service is to become a bridge between internal and external services to get data and take action according to the intelligent rule engine.

One limitation with Cloudwatch Events was that it supports fewer services and was restricted to only AWS services but with Event Bridge, it supports external services as well.

Guard Duty

This is one of the easiest service to enable and it is highly recommended. Setting up any IDS (Intrustion Detection System) can be a daunting task but with Guard Duty Service, your entire AWS Account will be covered to detect any bad actor trying to crack into your cloud infrastructure by detecting ping flood, SSH Brute force etc.

This service also works well with multiple AWS accounts – so if you are planning to setup a landing zone kind of architecture, then enable Guard Duty in your Central security account.

Macie

Handling PII data is always a tough task in the past and it can turn out be very expensive to handle. With services like AWS Macie, which is Machine Learning based, it can scan the AWS S3 buckets to give you information about anything related to Personal Information, Payment Information or other sensitive information which can be defined via rules.

This service will deliver a report and we can select the criticality level of Data. Right now, Macie only works with S3 and the API comes under the category of Data Leak Protection.

AWS Config

Cloud provides flexibility to change the infrastructure sizing at any point of time that is where the elasticity and real value of cloud lies. However, businesses need to follow their industry compliance standards under which, managing the entire history of infrastructure assets can be complex.

AWS Config released by AWS a few years ago, continuously checks the Infrastructure running in your account and monitors any change that takes place even in its supporting components. It records the entire lifecycle details of Infrastructure and can be integrated with AWS Lambda very well to achieve event-driven security.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Internet is open and vulnerable and so are web-facing applications. There are millions of web attacks happening every day and it may affect our business revenue if our applications and infrastructure are not ready to mitigate such attacks. WAF is a managed serverless service in AWS Portfolio. WAF can integrate with Application Load Balancer and can even work “on-the edge” when integrated with AWS Cloudfront (CDN service)

It can handle millions of hits per second with its intelligent rule engine to scan and block malicious traffic. OWASP top 10 attacks can be mitigated by using WAF in your Web facing application.

Security Hub

This service is relatively new but it is gaining maturity with time. The idea is to test you AWS Account against industry specific compliances. For example, if you want to build your Infrastructure for following PCI (Payment Card Industry), then this can be a one-stop scan to check if you are missing any critical points.

Security Hub is integrated with AWS Inspector which checks the CVE’s of OS and Applications (few tech stacks) and gives us central view of our account.

The Bottom Line on Cloud Infrastructure with AWS Event-Driven Security

Security is everyone’s responsibility and regardless of the scale of the organization, it should be considered seriously. Many services can be used to secure your AWS environment. We hope this article has helped you understand Cloud Infrastructure with AWS Event-Driven Security and how these can all be utilized with a “pay-as-you-go” cloud pricing model.

Need help to implement the required security protocols in your account? Contact our team at Cloud Kinetics for Cloud Infrastructure with AWS. We’ll be happy to perform a security assessment of your account and recommend the optimal security approach.

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Commvault® software can help you move your workloads across platforms in just a few clicks — accelerating your time-to-value when migrating to AWS. It provides the bridge from legacy to transitional hybrid to true exploitation of the public cloud.

By leveraging your backup copies, it reduces the risk and simplifies native moves to and from the cloud to fully migrate business critical workloads (including compliance, data governance, backup and more) into the cloud while assuring data security to, from, and in the cloud through advanced authentication and encryption protocols.

Get more value from your cloud investment – increase productivity, accelerate delivery and realize the true economics of the cloud with advanced orchestration, provisioning and management capabilities

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AWS has kept pace with the ongoing improvements in server processor technology. New instance type offerings are regularly introduced to deliver the improved performance capabilities to cloud customers. Cloud computing has reduced the lean time to market for such hardware improvements, dramatically, as a result.

In this post, we will explore major Instance types available and how you can choose the right type of instance for your Workload.

Basics of EC2

Before we begin, it is important to understand how to decode the AWS Instance naming convention. For example, let us look at Instance type – M5 Large.

M represents the Instance type signifying General Purpose which means it is a balanced combination of vCPU and RAM for most simple workloads.

5 represents Fifth Generation of Instance Type (in this case, it is Intel Skylake Chip).

Large represents the amount of vCPU and RAM for the instances type (as in size).

Another important point to note is that from M5 or any other fifth generation Instance class (R5 & C5), AWS comes with its own Virtualization layer called Nitro system. This is a new enhancement than the previous generations which were using Xen Hypervisor.

EC2 Instance Types

Amazon EC2 provides a broad array of instance types designed to address different use cases. Instance types offer a mix of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and provide you with the flexibility to choose the right mix combination of resources for your applications. Each instance type comprises of one or more instance sizes, which allows you to scale your resources according to the requirements of your target workload.

General Purpose

General purpose instances provide a combination of compute, memory and networking resources, and are suitable for a variety of diverse workloads. Such instances are perfect for applications that use these resources in equal proportions such as web servers and code repositories.

Compute Optimized

Such instances are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high performance processors. They are optimized for compute-intensive workloads and deliver cost-effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio.

Memory Optimized

If your application processes large datasets in memory, then memory optimized instances would be your choice. They are well suited for memory intensive applications such as high performance databases, big data analytics and enterprise applications.

Storage Optimized

Such instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage.

You can know more about AWS EC2 Instance types in this article.

Factors to consider before choosing EC2 Instance

Availability

The first and foremost factor to consider is that not every type of AWS Instance is available in every region. It is possible that the type of Instance you are looking for has not been released in your desired AWS region. In such cases, you will either need to choose an available previous-generation Instance of that type or change the Instance type. In most cases, widely used Instance types are available in all regions, but it might be prudent to ensure that your desired instance is available in your region.

Cost

Another Important point is that the EC2 charges might differ according to your region as it depends on factors such as Manpower, Electricity, Taxes etc. in that region. You might want to check the latest documentation for AWS EC2 charges in your desired region.

Payment models

AWS offers many payment models for EC2, depending on the product. You can choose the type of EC2 instance that best suits your needs.

On Demand: this is the easiest and most straightforward model in which you pay for what you use. This type of billing provides most flexibility as there is no commitment and you can spin up new instances, use and terminate, as required.

Reserved Instances: This is a more traditional payment model where you enter into a long term commitment with AWS. AWS provides significant discounts, up to 75%, by paying for capacity ahead of time. This model is beneficial in cases where you have steady workloads.

Spot Instances: Under this pricing mechanism, AWS lets you purchase spare computing capacity with no upfront commitment at discounted hourly rates.

Dedicated Host: This refers to a physical EC2 server dedicated for your use. This can help you reduce your costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (subject to license terms). An added advantage is this can help you meet compliance requirements.

AWS offers ‘per-second-billing’ for most of the Linux Instances across On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances and ‘per-hour-billing’ for other license-based OS. Per-second billing is particularly effective for resources that have periods of low and high usage such as development and testing, data processing, analytics, batch processing, and gaming applications.

The right type of Instance depends on the operation of your particular application. Identify whether your application is CPU-intensive, RAM-intensive or network-heavy and choose the instance type that best addresses your requirement.

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