Fifth Pillar

Cost optimization is a continual process of refinement and improvement over the spanof a workload’s lifecycle. The practices in this paper help you build and operate costaware workloads that achieve business outcomes while minimizing costs and allowing your organization to maximize its return on investment.

Design Principles

There are five design principles for cost optimization in the cloud:

  • Implement cloud financial management
  • Adopt a consumption model
  • Measure overall efficiency
  • Stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting
  • Analyze and attribute expenditure

Best Practices

As with the other pillars, there are trade-offs to consider. For example, do you want to optimize for speed to market or for cost? In some cases, it’s best to optimize for speed—going to market quickly, shipping new features, or simply meeting a deadline—rather than investing in up-front cost optimization.

Design decisions are sometimes directed by haste rather than data, and as the temptation always exists to overcompensate rather than spend time benchmarking for the most cost-optimal deployment. This might lead to over-provisioned and under-optimized deployments.

Using the appropriate services, resources, and configurations for your workloads is key to cost savings.

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