These days, a major part of most IT budgets is the cloud bill. But unlike server-bound infrastructure budgeting, cloud bills can be unpredictable and highly variable from month to month. However, if organizations embrace cloud cost optimization to regulate cloud bills and avoid surprises, they’ll find themselves with considerable found money that can be reinvested into other areas. Rather than applying IT budget toward bigger cloud bills, DevOps teams should consider cost as a critical AWS billing metric that can actually fuel faster growth.
Here are four ways you could reinvest your found cloud money into the engineering department:
1. Invest in Your Team
Above all else, the number-one driver of innovation in companies is people. If engineering departments could hire more talent, they’d be in a better position to deliver exciting, useful features and functionality to customers. Building a better, more nimble team can also help organizations out-navigate the competition.
Perhaps this found cloud money could help the engineering department hire talent with a new cloud skillset, such as serverless or containerized architecture. (We’ll get into more about that later.)
2. Burn Down Technical Debt
Many engineering departments are guilty of building a sub-optimal solution because it was easier or less time-consuming in the moment. Throwing additional cloud spend at these inefficient applications may keep the lights on, but is not an effective use of resources.
In other cases, new features are built on top of legacy systems, without addressing older issues. As a result, some components of the system may fall under tremendous strain, or systems could be reconfigured altogether. This technical debt can be frustrating for teams, as reworking can be both costly and time-consuming.
Instead of procrastinating on problems, found cloud money can help teams burn down technical debt, fix bugs, and invest in parts of the system that are under the most strain. Defining the organization’s specific technical debt and prioritizing what needs to be fixed can help make seemingly insurmountable issues (and ridiculous burndown charts) easier to handle.
3. Fund New Projects
Then again, maybe it’s time to declare bankruptcy on some of your technical debt. Rip and replace a troublesome legacy application that’s beyond repair. Or, maybe, there’s a new feature or product your team’s been dying to develop, but it doesn’t have the funds. That’s where found cloud money comes in.
Considering many organizations could be saving millions on their cloud bills with the right cloud optimization strategy, these millions could be reinvested into new projects that give the organization a real competitive advantage.
4. Refactor or Rearchitect Your Infrastructure
Overhauling infrastructure could mean different things to different teams. For some, it may mean modernizing legacy, server-bound applications by “lifting and shifting” them to the cloud. Others may be thinking about investments in containerization or serverless infrastructure, which require a larger up-front investment, but pay dividends in the long run.
If your organization had a few million dollars to spare, a serverless transformation might not seem as daunting (especially if you have already reinvested some found cloud money into headcount). What’s more, well-architected infrastructure and applications could make customers happier and drive costs down in the long run — even as the organization scales.
Want to Reduce Your Cloud Bill?
All of these savings that seem theoretical in a blog post can be tangible benefits that you see through tracking your AWS billing metrics. with a good cloud cost optimization strategy. CloudZero’s Managed Insights team can analyze your cloud infrastructure and provide ongoing recommendations on how to optimize your cloud spend, putting money back in your organization’s pocket. Meanwhile, you’ll gain a more cost-conscious DevOps culture, and the time and money you need to invest in innovation.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
