This report offers advice to help organizations reign in their spiraling cloud bills. It also offers guidance to get today’s enterprise moving toward more mature FinOps practices.
But, when it comes to cloud management, there’s still an elephant in the room: many workloads may have been prematurely “lifted-and-shifted” to the cloud.
Such workloads were intended to run in traditional data centers on hardware that was bought and paid for—not in the public cloud with its “by-the-second” billing. Running such workloads cost-effectively in the public cloud may now require significant refactoring or re-architecting.
In their initial migration efforts, organizations may have overlooked nuances of effective cloud design. For example, the emergence of serverless capabilities (with services like AWS Lambda, for instance) may now save a lot of money for certain workloads compared to their operation with virtual server-based licenses in IaaS environments.
Ultimately, Ziliak may have said it best. “The best cost management in the cloud involves leveraging the features of the cloud (elasticity, serverless operation, etc.). Refactoring applications is key for this.”