Mastering the Cloud: Saumen Biswas on Cutting Costs Without Cutting Corners
With the increased scalability and innovation available through cloud adoption, it’s no surprise cloud migration continues to be a massive trend. While cloud architectures have a well-earned reputation for being flexible and cost-efficient, there are still complex financial challenges with optimizing cloud adoption and use. As such, strategic cloud cost management is not just a necessity but rather an opportunity for more cloud-reliant organizations to set themselves apart from the competition through innovative solutions.
Saumen Biswas has firsthand experience leading the charge for cloud cost optimization. As a visionary technology leader for more than 15 years, Biswas is adept at combining financial and technical best practices, ensuring cost visibility, leveraging emerging tools and technologies, and fostering cost-aware engineering cultures. He led the team at his current organization to develop a comprehensive cost management framework, saving $1.4 million annually. His strategies to cut costs and ensure efficiency are balanced with performance and innovation while maintaining peak operational performance.
Biswas: It starts with understanding the cost structure of cloud computing, which cloud providers design to be cost-efficient and attractive to their customers. The billing structure usually consists of an initial, minimal licensing fee, then moves to a pay-per-use model. This means the cloud provider and the client organization agree on a monthly fee determined by the company’s base use of the provider’s cloud services. This is one of the main selling points of cloud services. Because cloud providers are powered by off-premises data centers with massive computing power, there’s no cap on the base services they can provide to client organizations. This allows businesses to scale up or down as needed using cloud resources without worrying about their on-premises infrastructure or resource limitations.
There are several caveats with this structure. First, no climate-conscious organization can get away with overusing the cloud without offsetting the environmental costs it incurs. Cloud computing data centers require enormous energy to power, cool, and maintain their servers. The more cloud services a company uses, the larger its carbon footprint. Increased environmental impact can decrease consumer use and contribute to the rise in global climate catastrophes.
Beyond the sustainability hazards of increased cloud computing, organizations that move past their estimated cloud usage incur higher costs. This isn’t a problem with on-premises systems, which have a built-in cost cap based on the systems’ capacity to scale up and use available resources. Using cloud providers, though, means organizations don’t have these built-in resources and scalability caps and can easily exceed their anticipated usage and budget. In worst-case scenarios, companies pay more in cloud fees than with all the combined costs of operating, maintaining, and scaling on-premises systems.
Q: How can organizations avoid these unwanted costs?
Biswas: As companies grow, they must maintain a heightened awareness of continuing cloud-use costs and adjust accordingly. This means guaranteeing accurate growth estimation models, recalculating them consistently, and immediately rightsizing applications using this information. It also means frequently auditing operations based on applications’ daily and cross-geographical uses and then negotiating all base-use cloud contracts accordingly. Constant, consistent, and proactive cost observation from multiple angles is crucial.
Q: Who is typically responsible for this cost observation and instigating the necessary adjustments?
Biswas: Currently, there isn’t an industry standard position to oversee these costs, so some organizations end up in the red. It’s an emerging responsibility that requires collaboration and communication between finance and accounting teams, which don’t typically have the engineering and technical knowledge needed to right-size applications or optimize resources, and engineering teams, who aren’t always aware of the costs they incur as they program and construct solutions. Without transparency between both departments, creating the best solutions and services without incurring unnecessary costs is difficult.
That said, technical program managers (TPMs) are becoming increasingly common. TPMs are specialized positions that play a crucial role in bridging the gap between the technical and financial aspects of engineering and DevOps projects. Their emergence is a reassuring sign that organizations can effectively manage cloud costs by designating and training a specialized TPM.
Q: What concrete strategies and best practices can TPMs implement to optimize cloud cost management?
Biswas: TPMs must understand that cost optimization isn’t a one-time fix but a cultural and practical shift within the company. In my experience, many of the best practices for cloud cost management require creating a cost-aware engineering culture first. This includes strategies like developing robust cost metrics for tracking the monthly usage of a particular database and analyzing the month-to-month use of reserved instances (RIs) to determine whether to purchase RIs upfront or opt for on-demand pricing.
Using these considerations, TPMs can encourage their teams to innovate in cost and resource optimization. Robust tagging and documentation policies, for instance, ensure that all resources are properly labeled and documented, making it easier to track and manage costs. Additionally, there are many traditional best practices TPMs can maintain, such as implementing efficient data storage and retrieval patterns and ensuring proper error handling and retry mechanisms to avoid unnecessary costs.
These changes also necessitate organizations to provide up-to-date training and resources for TPMs, accounting, and engineering teams to collaborate across departments. For example, accounting departments can train engineering teams on cloud-provided billing resources. This enables engineers to create in-house cost metrics aligned with accounting budgets and expectations, fostering better cross-functional alignment in cost management.
Q: What emerging technologies exist for TPMs to help them implement cloud cost-management strategies?
Biswas: AI-driven cloud tools are invaluable resources for TPMs. Using machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics, AI can monitor cloud costs, alert organizations to anomalies and cost increases in real time, and create predictive metrics to augment long- and short-term maturity models. These innovations lead to concrete, actionable answers to questions regarding resource utilization, savings opportunities, and RI purchasing strategies. Other emerging technologies include serverless computing, which allows organizations to pay only for the resources they use, and containerization, which enables efficient resource allocation and management. AI also exists within the cloud infrastructures, allowing organizations to invest in AI-driven cloud solutions, like autoscaling, to prevent them from paying for unneeded resources.
Leadership Is Key To Innovative Cloud Cost Management
Balancing cost with innovation isn’t a new issue, nor is it unique to cloud adoption. What is novel to cloud native software development is how, under exemplary leadership, the available technologies, strategies, and practices merge to encourage more innovative, cost-efficient solutions to problems. Leadership from TPMs is key to empowering innovative cloud cost management among teams. It’s imperative for leaders in the field to take on an active role in transforming their cost cultures to ensure the sustainable growth and cost efficiency of their organizations. By combining the best aspects of cloud cost management, leaders can optimize cost and use human resources more effectively, solving a significant problem and freeing time to focus on more critical, innovative activities and projects.
