4 Reasons Why Costs Should Be Considered For Any Effective Cloud Architecture
If you don’t consider these concept, your architectures cannot be effective in their solution.
Iused to think solutions architecture was all about the technology.
I remember working with experienced architects and them always focusing on the elements they thought was most important.
The functional and non-functional constraints.
These are typically:
accessibility
security
scalability
compliance
performance
…along with the functional elements of how features should work, and user behaviour on the application that was being designed.
But I noticed the one thing that was almost always overlooked or not even considered was cost.
Even when “budget” was mentioned, it was superficial and didn’t delve into the intricacies and dimensions of how costs affected the architecture in question.
After years of deep diving into this issue, I developed an awareness of costs in the architectures I designed and built.
Immediately the clients and businesses I worked with saw an increase in budget and solution efficiency. It was as if an untapped potential was born, something that was within their grasp but never explored.
What were the ways in which I accomplished this?
Here are 4 of them which I’ve learned over time:
1. Architecting For Cost Efficiency
Remember, a solution is only as effective as the business value that comes from it. And if the costs of the solution is higher than the revenue that comes from its usage, it is pretty much useless.
However, cost efficiency is not only about minimizing costs.
Designing for cost-efficiency is also about getting the most value for your investment.
One effective approach is to leverage managed services. These help you optimize for costs with a pay-per-use model.
Serverless architectures allow you to pay for the time you use resources only.
Services like Lambda and S3 allow you to optimize costs without sacrificing availability, increasing the value of the solution.
2. Cost-aware Design Patterns
Architecting with an awareness of cost will have a profound impact on the solution’s effectiveness.
For example, designing a microservices architecture can allow for more granular scaling and decoupling of services, letting you allocate resources precisely where they are needed rather than applying them generally to a monolithic application.
Another cost aware pattern involves using leftover capacity like spot instances. These offer significant cost savings for non-critical workloads.
3. Pay For What You Use
One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is the ability to pay only for what you use.
However, this can also work against you.
Overprovisioning resources and leaving stored data to be unoptimized can quickly lead to high or unexpected costs.
The key here is to align your architecture with your business requirements.
How can you do this?
For example, selecting a highly available database service might be necessary for critical workloads, even though it will probably come at a higher price.
On the other hand, selecting a cheaper database for non-critical workloads will be more beneficial here.
4. Right-sizing resources
Right sizing involves selecting the appropriate type and size of resources to match your workload needs.
This can drastically reduce your monthly bills.
By reducing the capacity to get as close as the traffic usage is how to most efficiently reduce your architecture costs.
This naturally requires a deep understanding of your application and user’s behaviour, as well as your ability monitor these resources constantly.
Right sizing is an ongoing and evolving process, not something you do once and forget.
Constant monitoring and optimizing based on changing traffic behaviours is one of the most effective strategies you can implement to save on your cloud costs.
Conclusion
Including cost considerations into cloud architecture is not just about minimizing expenses but about maximizing the value of your solutions.
By embracing strategies like cost-efficient design, pay-per-use models, and right-sizing resources, you can significantly enhance your solution architecture’s budget efficiency and maintain optimal performance and scalability.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master Serverless, Cloud Computing, and AWS.
🚀 If you want to learn how to build serverless, scalable, and resilient applications, you can also follow me on Linkedin for valuable daily posts.
Thanks for reading and see you in the next one!