Reduce Operating Costs By 80%
Your monthly cloud invoices are an excellent indicator of your organization’s maturity and efficiency.
In your data centers the sticker shock happens upfront when you purchase your hardware. The shock doesn’t happen again until too late in the game when you realize that you didn’t purchase enough processing power or memory. Meanwhile it is very difficult to account for how effectively these resources are utilized. The industry average is in the neighborhood of 10% utilization.
When you Lift & Shift your systems to the cloud the sticker shock happens with every monthly invoice. As your systems in the cloud mature from a Lift & Shift model to a Software Defined Infrastructure model it is not unlikely to see a reduction in cost in the range of 60%. This is because those instances that are running at only 10% utilization, yet billing by the hour, can be terminated when they are not needed. This concept of disposable infrastructure is very powerful once all deployments have been automated.
As you implement new features on a Cloud Native (i.e. Serverless) architecture it is typical to see a reduction in cost approaching 70% or more - as compared to a container based architecture. When deployed in multiple regions the savings can reach 90%. This is possible because the Cloud Native resources are paid for by the sip versus by the hour. Thus under utilization is virtually, if not literally, eliminated. There are some high profile examples where customers report executing billions of function-as-a-service calculations per month for a few hundred dollars.
Cloud Native monthly invoices are also a form of performance metric as they specifically indicate how many sips (i.e. transactions) were executed. This translates into extremely accurate cost forecasting and budgeting. Given historical information on traffic volumes and a proposed or actual Cloud Native system design, it is straight forward to estimate the monthly cost. Furthermore, the risk of inaccurate capacity planning is mitigated by the implicit elasticity of Cloud Native systems.
Last but not least are the human resource costs. The cloud is based on a shared responsibility model. Below a certain line is the responsibility of the cloud provider and above that line is your responsibility. With Cloud Native that line is drawn significantly high. As a result, small teams can implement and operate significant systems.
All in all, under the power of a Cloud Native architecture, more and more can be accomplished with significantly less risk and amazingly less cost.
