Cloud Wastes And How To Avoid It: Idle Resources
What are Cloud Wastes?
In AWS reInvent 2019, it was reported that among enterprise users, 35% of their annual cloud spend was waste, amounting to over $10 billion. If enterprises, with all the resources in technology, governance, and expertise can spend this amount of money on cloud wastes, how much more startups and SMEs, I can only imagine what that figure would be like.
Cloud wastes come from cloud resources that are not being paid for but not being used; and this goes against the very pricing value proposition that cloud computing offers to its users –which is that you pay for only what you use!
Call it a conscience check or just plain integrity on the part of the CSPs (Cloud Service Providers) for calling it out themselves, albeit they still get their revenue–cloud waste or not. Cloud computing promises a savings on IT infrastructure total cost of ownership, but as the saying goes, “You can take the guy out of the neighbourhood but you can't take the neighbourhood out of the guy”, a lot of us are still not cost conscious enough to maximise the cloud computing pricing value proposition of actually paying only for what you use.
According to Gartner, “Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% in 2022 to total $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. In 2023, end-user spending is expected to reach nearly $600 billion”. While approximately 82% of organisations say that implementing cloud systems turned out to be more expensive than initially thought. Organisations have also indicated their public cloud spend was over budget by an average of 13%.
Organisations have, however, begun to resort globally to SaaS products like Wendu for more efficient DevOps processes in cloud security and management.
We’ll begin a series on cloud wastes and cloud waste management. Is it possible to completely eliminate cloud wastes, or how far can we go in actually eliminating cloud waste spend?
Idle Resources
Every year, a large amount of cloud waste is gotten from Idle resources; and an estimated $14.5B will be wasted on idle cloud resources this year. Just to put that in perspective.
Idle resources are like attic windows left open and unattended to. We all know how messy that can get. From burglaries, to unwanted non-human flying and creeping guests, to the natural forces, we are bound to spend more money, time, and effort cleaning up the after effects of it.
Idle resources usually come in these forms:
- On Demand Instances / VMs: Because of how easy it is to spin up resources on-demand on the cloud, it’s also as easy to forget to delete resources not being used. In the course of my conversing with clients on cost optimization opportunities on their AWS accounts, I’ve had a client once share with me how they spinned up 4 RDS instances and forgot to switch them off. At the end of the month, their bill went up almost 4 times over. On-demand instances are the top cloud idle resources, especially for non production purposes, and management opportunities here are to have visibility of these resources based on utilisation levels, and automate putting off after work hours using SaaS tools such as Wendu.
- Databases: Databases aren’t always working, and quite frankly, don’t always need to be up and running. Make sure to always review your database infrastructure and terminate any unnecessary services, or rightsize where possible. Cloud waste management opportunities here are utilisation visibility with Saas tools like Wendu.
Wendu and Cloud Waste Management
Cloud wastes are a global industry problem, and you can be sure of managing and reducing your organisation’s cloud wastes using cloud security and management SaaS tools such as Wendu to identify idle and under utilised resources within your AWS infrastructure.
Learn more about Wendu here, and you can also request a demo to see Wendu in action.