A typical Startup often starts on a shoestring operation, with initial funding from the founders, more so, from their friends and families. So it’s pretty much crucial for a Startup to look for ways to start their projects for people, cloud setup, and marketing.
However, every startup needs to manage its capital to be successful. Therefore, these startups must optimize their cloud spend. Whether you’re looking for compute power, database storage, content delivery, or other functionality, there are tons of providers that offer their services to help you build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.
Before you initiate choosing a web services provider, you will need to consider few factors; such as – the provider should allow the smallest to the largest of Startups to scale as needed. In addition, it is dedicated to helping customers achieve the highest saving potential on their cloud spends.
The web services provider needs to facilitate Cloud Financial Management (CFM) to Startups that will ensure visibility into workload costs and help startups succeed.
It has never been more critical than during the current COVID era, with so many local and international startups looking for tangible advice and practical tips to cut cloud costs during a challenging time. Henceforth, cloud cost optimization has become an unbeatable key factor in determining a startup’s success or failure. So, a startup needs to choose web service providers based on the following factors.
The provider should have to enable local and global startups to expand business ideas quickly and cost-effectively through cost optimization tools and exercises. It should allow founders to focus on experimentation with minimal risk, development of new business concepts, and speeding up time-to-market. However, the below factors need to be considered before making a decision when it comes to having a cloud-spend issue:
Cost explorer facility: Cost Explorer enables you to have an easy-to-use interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage costs and usage over time.
Startups can get started quickly by creating custom reports that analyze cost and usage data. Analyze data at a high level (for example, total costs and usage across all accounts) or dive deeper into the cost and usage data to identify trends, pinpoint cost drivers, and detect anomalies. Comprehensive dashboards: Make sure you gain a summary view of key cost details, including month-to-date costs, month-end forecasted costs and saved reports.
Automated trend analysis: It identifies unusual cost and usage events, based on historical patterns.
Budgets: Businesses and organizations need to plan and set expectations around cloud costs. However, cloud agility requires you to adapt your forecasting processes and tools to match the dynamic nature of your usage. Set up custom budgets and stay informed of how your cost and usage progress and respond quickly when cost or usage exceeds the threshold.
Provider’s budgets should allow you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage from the simplest to the most complex use cases, so that you can choose to be alerted by email or SNS notification when actual or forecasted cost and usage exceed your budget threshold, or when your actual RI and Savings Plans’ utilization or coverage drops below your desired threshold.
With budget Actions, you can also configure specific actions to respond to cost and usage status in your accounts, so that if your cost or usage exceeds or is forecasted to exceed your threshold, actions can be executed automatically or with your approval to reduce unintentional over-spending.
User experience: Simplified workflows in order to make it easier to create and manage budgets
Cost Explorer integration: It needs to have contextually relevant data to help you set budgets appropriately.
Review budget performance: View how your actuals have performed against your budget.
Trusted advisor solution: The trusted advisor explorer solution automatically provisions the infrastructure necessary to aggregate cost optimization recommendations and actively track cost optimization health across your organization over time.
Well-architected Tool: Well-architected tool helps customers review the state of their workloads and compare them to the latest and architectural best practices.
A Startup’s Cloud Spend
Right-sizing: Right-sizing is the key when it comes to optimizing cloud spend that is given below. • Always use the lowest cost resources that meet the workload requirements • Picking the right side of the machine • Iterate by adjusting the size of resources to optimize for costs • Picking the right service for the right need • Monitor resources and alarms to provide the data for right-sizing • In order to continually Right-size, you need the data to make the right decisions
Managed Services: Managed Services helps startups as follows. • Remove the burden of the undifferentiated heavy lifting • Focus on innovating rather than keeping the lights on • Can offer a lower cost per transaction or service • Managed services operate at cloud scale • Reduce or retire technical debt • Move to services that are maintained by the provider • Potential to remove or reduce software license costs
Tips for startups:
Startups must ensure they visibility into their workload costs and create reports and budgets and alerts for when spending deviates from what’s expected.
Even non-tech-savvy founders should be aware of these important aspects. Lastly, ensure that you’re using the right cloud services for the right projects.
