Cloudamize has helped thousands of companies in their journey to the cloud focusing on the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). After assessing a company’s current IT landscape and the workloads running on their servers, we provide them with several in-cloud scenarios to consider. For example:
- On demand pricing for servers optimised for the workloads they are currently running.
- Reserved Instance pricing with a 1 year or 3 year commitment
- All-up-front or no-up-front pricing.
In most cases, Reserved Instance pricing will be significantly cheaper than on demand pricing saving customers between 25% and 75% depending on the term and how much is paid up front. Surprisingly, we recently had a customer where on demand pricing was cheaper than Reserved Instance pricing!
More than one way to save
Moving to the cloud opens up several different ways you can manage and reduce costs:
- Rightsizing – The cloud makes it easy to change the size and profile of each server to match the workload running on it, and to adjust up or down as the workload changes. No more guessing what the workload will be 2 or 3 years in the future and over sizing based on predicted need.
- Usage Commitments – For stable workloads you can purchase Reserved Instances, committed use discounts, or saving plans which can save up to 75%.
- Instance scheduling – Not every server needs to run 24/7. For servers that can be run on a schedule or that are not used on nights or weekends, several services make it easy to run your servers when you need them and shut them down when you don’t.
- And others – Moving to containers, leveraging spot instances, using serverless functions, and other strategies can also lower your TCO.
Why Reserved Instance pricing was more expensive
Our customer wasn’t running their servers all of the time! Only 2% of their machines were on 24/7. 75% of their machines were on an average of 18 hours a day and 16% of their machines were on an average of 14 hours a day. This was a rare case of using instance scheduling for on premises servers. Reserved Instance pricing assumes your server will be running 24/7 and for servers that run all of the time, this usage commitment is rewarded with lower per hour costs. However, if you are using instance scheduling to turn off machines at the end of the day or over the weekend and then turn them back on based on a schedule, on demand pricing might be cheaper in the long run even though the per hour cost is more. Learn more about how Equans saved upwards of ~$20K annually with their results from Cloudamize DISCOVER.
Timing
While some of the optimizations that are available in the cloud can also be implemented on-prem or in your own data center, it often requires extra software, engineering, and staff to make it happen. While it is technically possible, as demonstrated by our customer, to implement an instance scheduling system, almost no one does. In fact, this is the first of thousands of customers we’ve helped on their cloud journey.
For most companies a two-pronged approach is best:
- Move quickly – Move everything to the cloud as fast as possible. Using Cloudamize you can optimize each server to fit their workload in this step.
- Optimize continually – Once you are in the cloud you can begin optimizing each machine and each process using the strategies discussed above.
What is the best approach for you?
No two companies are the same and there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when migrating to the cloud. Most companies use a combination of the strategies discussed to optimize their journey to the cloud. Cloudamize makes it easy to see what your options are and our Designer feature lets you customize your plan by “turning the dials” for all of the options.
Ready to learn more about how Cloudamize can help you migrate to the cloud focusing on the lowest TCO? Request a demo with us.
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