Making the Most of Cloud Spending

Cloud Credits

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure are such attractive cloud service providers because of their free credits. At the time of writing, GCP is offering up to $300,000 in credits for AI startups. Those credits can be a huge advantage to companies large and small. The best practices to follow when you have credits are the same as without, but credits will take you further.

Noop is how you can leverage credits without hiring specialists to manage cloud services. Noop encourages (and in some cases enforces) cost-saving best practices with all necessary components to develop, deploy and run enterprise-grade applications — Noop is built for developers.

Expertise is the Hidden Cloud Cost

When you consider how complicated the big three cloud providers are it isn’t any wonder they offer credits to attract new customers. When using one of the big three, it is typical to have dedicated expertise to manage the operations of running software in those clouds.

It takes substantial knowledge just to understand what services are available, managing what those services cost is another job in itself. In fact, large organizations dedicate teams of people to cloud management responsibilities. And while credits expire, dedicated expertise is a constant feature of leveraging general-purpose clouds.

The right expertise helps guide the organization toward essential operational components that both provide necessary capabilities and keeps costs down.

Making The Most of Cloud With or Without Credits

Regardless of available credits, strict management of cloud resources and careful budgeting lets developers get more for their money. All cloud providers have discount programs that work on the principle that committed spending will reduce overall cost. In other words if you commit to spending a certain amount of money over a specific timeframe, the cost will be lower than if you purchased the same resources over that same period without a commitment.

On Amazon Web Services discount programs include:

• Reserved instances (RIs) and spot instances
• AWS Savings Plans are a lot like RIs, but have specific limitations depending on the savings plan
• Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), sometimes referred to as a private pricing agreement (PPA)
• AWS partner programs and the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

Google Cloud discount programs include:

• Committed use discounts (CUDs) one or three year commitment of spend or resource usage in exchange for a discount
• Sustained use discounts (SUDs) are applied automatically when resources cross specific time usage thresholds
• Spot instances

Azure has the most discount options, highlights include:

• Reservations (specific resource allocation)
• Savings plans for compute (across usage categories)
• Several migration programs including FastTrack, Migration and Modernization Program
• Spot instances

Their offers page provides an index to the different programs.

Other general cost-saving considerations:

• Automatically turn off unused resources
• Downscale development and test resources without compromising production parity
• Create ad-hoc environments from manifests or infrastructure as code to reduce setup labor and reduce errors

When used carefully, credits provide an opportunity to try things that would otherwise be too risky. Having the freedom to experiment without the risk of losing money, developers can find opportunities they would otherwise miss. As long as good practices are maintained while credits are available and continuing once they’re gone, credits provide a substantial business advantage.