Bonus: Does your workload qualify for AWS spot instances? [CHEAT SHEET]
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Spot Instances: How to Reduce AWS, Azure, and GCP Costs by 90%
What is Cost-based Optimization?
In our previous blog posts (1, 2), we explored how query optimizers may consider different equivalent plans to find the best execution path. But what does it mean for the plan to be the "best" in the first place? In this blog post, we will discuss what a plan cost is and how it can be used to drive optimizer decisions.
Example
Consider the following query:
GCP Cost Management Best Practices
One of the advantages of building your infrastructure through cloud providers is that you can scale up and down as per your business’ resource demands and pay only for the services that you leverage. However, if you don’t keep an eye on which services are running and monitor your billing and performance regularly, you may end up incurring unnecessary and inefficient business costs.
At GCP, the platform’s solution architects work very closely with their customers to support Google Cloud cost optimization and control the expenses. There are several tools and tricks that are simple to exploit to save unnecessary costs on GCP. It’s simply a matter of knowing what and where to track. In this article, we will discuss Google Cloud cost management and uncover how you can optimize performance and resources to get the best usage output.
How to Achieve Effective Kubernetes Cost Optimization
Kubernetes is ruling the container market. According to a CNCF survey, the use of Kubernetes in production in 2020 was 93%, up from 78% in 2019. Moreover, the survey reveals that the use of containers in production in 2020 was 92%. This figure is up 300% from CNCF’s first survey in 2016.
Due to the adoption of Kubernetes by DevOps teams and the open source community’s encouragement, this figure could grow more. And if it stays at present prices, this market share still is a significant portion. This means that even though Kubernetes makes a lot of things easier, challenges will always appear, as the survey confirms. Namely, the problems listed include networking, storage, tracking, surveillance, a lack of preparation, and, of course, cost management.
A Short Introduction to FinOps
As a part of our cost optimization series, we already talked about the most common AWS cost optimization challenges and the reasons why every company needs to solve this. In this article, we’re talking about FinOps as a way to optimize cloud costs.
To solve their cloud cost optimization problems, some companies develop FinOps practices. FinOps refers to Cloud Financial Management. It is the process of adding financial transparency to the cloud’s variable expenditure model. The goal is to empower teams to balance between speed, expense, and quality.
Cost Optimization on AWS EKS Clusters
Containerization and modern cloud infrastructure have made it possible to deploy even the most complex applications without making big initial investments. With most cloud computing models, you pay fixed fees only for the resources you use, and you are all set. Scaling up (and down) becomes easier too since you are not actually investing in the physical hardware supporting the cloud cluster.
While the available services certainly make cloud computing more accessible, they still could cost a lot, especially when the cost of using cloud resources is not managed properly. It is easy to fall into the trap of buying into more resources that are not fully utilized and ending up paying more than you should.
Six Ways to Scale Back Your Dev Costs Immediately
With the Coronavirus economic crash, companies are scrambling to reduce costs. For many online and technology companies, however, the shift to online work and online learning and streaming media means their services are more in demand than ever. So how do you address the need to scale back your spending and at the same time scale up your services? Here are some suggestions:
Assess Your Team and Resources
Personnel costs may be your largest expense right now, but they are also the only way of driving down all your other costs. You will need to reduce your technology costs through your engineering team and its core competencies, so you need to understand those competencies clearly as you construct your plan to reduce costs. Before you start laying people off, make sure you understand what your teams are capable of, and who will be instrumental in helping you weather the economic storm. You need to have a team that will fit your technology, and vice versa.
Desktop on Cloud: Productive, Cost-Effective and More Secure
If you’ve ever heard the terms “Virtual Desktop” or “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure” (VDI), but you’re not sure what they mean, then this article is for you. Read on to find out what a virtual desktop is, what it does, and how it might benefit you to have one.
Optimizing Database Performance and Efficiency
It's easy for modern, distributed, high-scale applications to hide database performance and efficiency problems. Optimizing performance of such complex systems at scale requires some skill, but more importantly it requires a sound strategy and good observability, because you can't optimize what you can't measure. This session explains a performance measurement and optimization process anyone can use to deliver results predictably, optimizing customer experience while freeing up compute resources and saving money.
The session begins with what to measure and how; how to analyze it; how to categorize problems into one of three types; and three matching strategies to use in optimization as a result. It is a recursive method that can be used at any scale, from a data center with many types of databases cooperating as one, to a single server and drilling down to a single query. Along the way, we'll discuss related concepts such as internally- and externally-focused golden signals of performance and resource sufficiency, workload quality of service, and more.
The 10 Must-Have Project Management Skills of 2019
Project management is a thick-skinned job. In fact, it consists of various not-so-easy jobs all combined to do one job. The job starts with initiating the project, then planning the strategies, executing them, and finally, controlling and closing the project. The project gets more challenging when the timeline is short and budget is limited.
To deliver the project successfully, a project manager needs a set of various skills. These skills include technical knowledge, people management, and developing sustainable processes for the business.
The Invisible Taxes Organizations Pay
Organizations are always on the lookout to cut costs and scale back when they have unfavorable reporting periods. Hiring freezes and cutbacks in training and traveling tend to be popular and convenient. These costs are tangible and easy to track. These are only marginal to the true savings they could get by removing the "invisible taxes" most organizations are paying without even tracking.
Organizations are spending valuable money on invisible costs. Cost of delay, cost of multi-tasking, and cost of meetings. In organizations running Agile, these costs are amplified due to the impact of short time boxes.
Project Cost Management: How Do You Manage Your Budgets?
Cost is one of the major aspects that powers a project toward success. Thus, it is very important to ensure that there is a sufficient supply of funds coming in, from the correct sources and at the correct time, to meet all the project requirements. Thus, project managers use a systematic approach to manage the overall cost expenses in a project, which is known as project cost management. Through this article, I will be giving you a detailed explanation of what exactly is cost management, how it is done and what are the processes involved in it.
In this project cost management article, I will be taking you through the following topics:
5 Tricks to Help You With AWS Cost Optimization
By the end of 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will move to a “cloud-only” from a "cloud-first" strategy. Any “no-cloud” policies will be nearly extinct by the year 2020. This is mainly because large, medium and small firms are looking for an alternative to reduce their capital expenditure-intensive IT models. Cloud provides a variable cost and pay-as-you-go model, making it economical. Additionally, the scalability and flexibility that comes along with using AWS make it a superior solution than the traditional methods. Companies adopt cloud computing because of its scalability, security or maybe just because cloud computing is the latest trend. Regardless, many have noticed that AWS cost have spiked and spend trends keeps going upwards.
The pricing methods at first look very simple but as you expand, mixing lots of products, it gives you a hard time tracking the ever-growing cost of your cloud infrastructure. Thus, it is really important that you maintain strict Amazon Web Services billing hygiene. Let us, in this short article, examine a few strategies that will help you maintain this hygiene.