How to Save Cloud Costs: A Practical Guide for DevOps Teams

Managing cloud costs is a crucial task for any DevOps team handling hundreds of servers on AWS and DigitalOcean. At Glinteco, where we manage extensive cloud infrastructure for our customers, we regularly perform cost audits to reduce expenses while ensuring optimal performance. Here’s how your DevOps team can save cloud costs through actionable strategies.

1. Conduct Regular Cloud Audits

Monthly cost reviews involve reviewing cloud expenses using AWS Cost Explorer or DigitalOcean usage reports. After a monthly review, we found several idle EC2 instances running development workloads that were no longer needed. Terminating them saved 20% of our cloud costs that month.

Audit unused resources by identifying and deleting unused or underutilized instances, storage volumes, and static IPs.

Rightsizing means resizing instances to match actual workloads. Use performance monitoring tools to determine the optimal configurations. In one case, a client running a web application on t2.large instances had consistent CPU utilization under 10%. We downsized them to t2.micro, saving $2,000 annually.

2. Choose Cost-Effective Compute Options

Consider reserved instances (RIs) by prepaying for instances to reduce long-term costs.

Use spot instances for non-critical workloads, saving up to 90%. We migrated a client's batch processing jobs to spot instances, reducing compute costs by 75%.

Auto-scaling ensures that workloads are managed efficiently by implementing AWS Auto Scaling or DigitalOcean’s scaling features.

3. Leverage Serverless Architectures

Use AWS Lambda & DigitalOcean Functions to run applications serverlessly, eliminating idle time and reducing expenses. A startup migrated its REST API to AWS Lambda, cutting hosting costs from $500/month to $100/month.

4. Optimize Storage Costs

AWS S3 storage tiers allow you to use lifecycle policies to move data to cheaper storage tiers like Glacier.

DigitalOcean block storage can be optimized by deleting unused volumes and adjusting snapshot policies. One client saved 30% by enabling automatic snapshot deletion for outdated backups.

5. Use Managed Services Wisely

Databases like AWS RDS or DigitalOcean Managed Databases reduce administrative costs.

Caching services like AWS ElastiCache or Redis on DigitalOcean can lower costs. Introducing Redis caching reduced a client’s database load by 60%, lowering RDS instance costs.

6. Minimize Data Transfer Costs

Use CDNs such as AWS CloudFront or DigitalOcean’s CDN for efficient content delivery.

Traffic monitoring helps track inbound and outbound traffic and optimize load balancers. Optimizing a client’s CDN caching rules cut bandwidth expenses by 40%.

7. Automate Cost Management

Monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch, DigitalOcean Monitoring, or third-party services like Datadog provide real-time insights.

Automation scripts can be developed to remove idle resources, enforce cost-saving policies, and perform auto-scaling adjustments. A custom script that shut down development servers outside of working hours reduced monthly cloud bills by 35%.

8. Set Budgets and Alerts

Budget planning involves defining budgets using AWS Budgets or DigitalOcean alerts.

Notification setup allows for automated alerts to notify your team when nearing spending limits.

9. Provide Team Training and Awareness

Training sessions help DevOps teams understand best practices for cloud cost management.

Regular reviews with the team can identify cloud expense optimizations and cost-saving opportunities.

By following these steps, your DevOps team can reduce cloud expenses significantly while maintaining robust infrastructure performance. Stay tuned for detailed screenshots and walkthroughs from our AWS and DigitalOcean accounts to see how we implement these practices in real-world scenarios.

Have specific questions about cloud cost optimization? Contact us for more details.