How a Little "Spring Cleaning" Can Help Optimize Cloud Spending

If you're like many folks at this time of year, you'll be doing a bit of spring cleaning to remove the dust and dirt that inevitably pile up within your home during the winter.

If you manage a business that uses the cloud, there's another type of spring cleaning to consider: Removing unnecessary resources from your cloud computing environment. Even in companies with well-managed cloud strategies, cloud waste tends to accumulate over time, leading, in some cases, to dramatic levels of unnecessary cloud spending.

Indeed, one client I'm currently working with as part of my job helping organizations optimize cloud spending has found that a "spring cleaning" initiative cut its cloud costs by 10%—in return for the relatively small amount of time and effort required to identify and clean up cloud waste.

Drawing on that experience, here's a look at the types of cloud waste businesses can tidy up as part of periodic cloud cost optimization reviews.

Aged snapshots

Most cloud providers allow customers to take snapshots of cloud servers. They can then use snapshots to restore a cloud server if it fails or revert the server to an earlier point in time to fix problems triggered by configuration changes.

However, storing snapshots costs money, and snapshots are only valuable if they're relatively recent. A snapshot taken several months ago is not very useful because if you used it to restore a cloud server, you'd end up with outdated configuration and data.

For that reason, finding and deleting outdated snapshots is an easy way to save money in the cloud. The client I'm working with cut its overall cloud costs by 2%, or about $70,000 per month, simply by removing obsolete snapshots sitting around for no good reason.

Detached volumes

Detached volumes are another example of a cloud resource that tends to pile up unnoticed, costing businesses money for no good purpose.

When you shut down a cloud server, you can "detach" the associated storage volume. Sometimes, you want to keep the volume on hand so you can use it with a different cloud server later. But too often, businesses keep detached volumes sitting around and never use them again.

To improve cloud spending, identify detached volumes that no one has accessed in a substantial period. Then, ask the engineers who created or managed the volumes whether they should be retained. If not, delete them to help optimize your cloud spending. My client reduced its cloud bills by about 1.5% by removing unused detached volumes.

Unused IP addresses

Unused IP addresses are another source of unnecessary cloud spending, especially since Amazon Web Services (AWS) began charging an hourly rate for public IPv4 addresses in February 2024. If you request IP addresses of this type but don't use them by assigning them to an active cloud server, you waste money.

Note, too, that although the charges for IP addresses may seem minor—at AWS, the cost is just USD0.005 per address per hour—they can add up. My client (a Managed Service Provider with many public-facing server instances to support) was wasting about USD40,000 per month, or more than 1% of its total cloud bill, on unused IPs.

So, as you embark on cloud spring cleaning, review your list of IP addresses and remove any addresses you don't need.

Idle load balancers

Load balancers are similar to IP addresses in that they're a type of cloud resource that costs little individually but can lead to major financial waste when you don't manage them properly. Amazon charges just pennies per hour for most load balancers, but my client was spending thousands of dollars per month on load balancers it wasn't using—because, again, the company deployed a wide array of servers in the cloud and had set up several load balancers to support them but forgot to delete many load balancers when they became unnecessary.

For that reason, review your list of load balancers and identify candidates for deletion as part of your cloud spring cleaning initiative.

Idle compute resources

Idle compute resources, such as cloud servers that a team spun up for testing purposes but then forgot to shut off when the tests ended, tend to be a source of cloud waste that businesses notice more readily than the other items I'm discussing in this article. Many organizations already do a reasonably good job tracking and shutting down idle compute resources. For example, my client wasted only USD7,000 per month in this category, a fraction of the sum spent on unnecessary snapshots or detached volumes.

Nonetheless, because it's so easy for teams to spin up cloud servers and forget to turn them off, identifying and shutting down this resource should be a routine part of cloud spring cleaning. Chances are you'll find some money you can save in this category, even if this is not among your main sources of cloud waste.

Object storage waste

Object storage services, like Amazon S3, can store virtually any type of information. That flexibility makes them a convenient place for businesses to dump data of all types.

However, this convenience may also lead to situations where organizations place lots of data in object storage that they no longer need—and cloud providers offer few tools to help track which data exists in object storage or figure out whether any of it should be removed.

That's why reviewing object storage resources periodically is critical. Look for data that no one in your company has accessed recently. You can remove the data permanently if you no longer need it. If you need it in the future but are not likely to access it frequently, consider moving it to a lower-cost object storage tier, such as Amazon Glacier, which costs substantially less than default object storage configurations. My client found that cleaning up object storage resources reduced overall cloud spending by about 0.5 percent.

Spring cleaning: A low-effort way to cut cloud spending

Changes like those I've described above did not take much time or effort to implement compared to more complex cloud cost savings measures, like rightsizing server instances (which is complicated because it requires a systematic review of server configurations). But the impact is significant. Again, these changes reduced my MSP client's total cloud bills by about 10%, or hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly.

I tell this story as a reminder about why periodic cleanups of cloud environments are so important. Like cleaning your home in spring, you often don't realize how much waste has accumulated in your cloud until you set out to clean it up. You may be surprised by just how much healthier your business becomes financially by investing a little time in spring cleaning.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/Andrii Zorii