It’s summertime, and the livin’ is expensive — especially if you do a lot of business in the cloud. The good news is that we’re all in the same boat, and it appears the cloud provider giants have started to take notice. So, pull up a rocking chair, pour a glass of lemonade, and let’s talk cloud cost news from the scorchingly hot month of July 2024:
- AWS made it a little bit easier to track spending in more detail.
- The pressure is on cloud providers to lower costs as large enterprises begin exiting the space.
- Cloud-based AI continues to grow in popularity despite rising costs.
Get the details below.
Top Cloud Cost News From July 2024
AWS added another dimension to its Cost Categories tool
At CloudZero, we’re big believers in granular data. The more you can break your data down and examine it from every direction, the better decisions you can make for your business.
That’s why we’re pleased to see that AWS has added a way to track costs by “Billing Entity” within its Cost Categories tool. “Billing Entity” allows users to track invoices and transactions from within AWS Marketplace and for other AWS cloud services.
While this might not seem like world-changing news, we take it as a good sign. AWS seems to understand that its customers need granularity in their cost data in order to stay on top of cloud costs, and every little step in that direction is a big win for users.
Cloud analysts projected some big changes for the near future in terms of cloud costs
Do you remember the first exciting days when public cloud services became widespread? The world was bright and full of promise, with new functionality and lower costs just waiting to be realized.
If you feel like the reality of the cloud has somewhat fallen short of the initial promises, you’re not alone. Enterprises in particular have begun to assert that cloud costs are so staggering, it’s actually often worthwhile to move away from the cloud and back to on-premises computing.
If you own or have a large stake in a company that operates fully or mostly in the cloud, you might feel anxious at that news. However, we sincerely have no reason to think that the bottom is about to fall out of your business. In fact, large enterprises exiting the cloud can only be a good thing for you.
This is the first time that cloud providers are truly seeing how their rising costs are turning away business in droves, and there’s no way that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft will let go of numerous enterprise clients without a fight. Over the next few years, cloud experts hope a surge in competition will drive prices down into reasonable territory once more.
With that said, Microsoft says the cloud is still the place to be if you want the benefits of AI without upfront infrastructure costs
Microsoft recently surveyed over 300 IT professionals who migrated operations to Azure. Specifically, Microsoft wanted to know how moving to Azure has impacted AI operations.
Despite the widely-agreed-upon high costs of cloud computing, it appears that many Azure customers still prefer running their AI applications in the cloud. On-prem AI has several notable cost drawbacks, including significant upfront hardware investments, high hardware maintenance costs, and financial barriers to scalability as companies grow.
It’s a good idea to run your own numbers if you’re unsure whether using AI in the cloud is worth your company’s while. But unless you happen to already have a data center ready and waiting at your disposal, you’re likely going to agree with the survey respondents that — for now, at least — it’s more financially viable to keep AI operations in the cloud.
Not Sure How To Examine Your Own Cloud Costs?
It’s tough to make good financial decisions for your company when you can’t track exactly where your money is going every month.
With CloudZero, you can keep a close eye on every dollar you spend in the cloud. You’ll know how much you pay for every single service down to the granular resource level. That means when your costs begin to climb or if you want to know if you could save money by switching to another service, you’ll have the data you need right in front of you.
to see how CloudZero can change your entire approach to managing cloud costs.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
