Use tools to control cloud costs before it’s too late

The public cloud’s on-demand pricing model is vital in enabling application scalability — the key benefit of cloud computing. Resources need to be readily available for a cloud application to scale when required without the customer having to give advance notification. Cloud providers can offer such flexibility by allowing customers to pay their bills in arrears based on the number of resources consumed during a specified period.

This flexibility does have a downside, however. If more resources are consumed than expected due to increased demand or configuration errors, the organization is still liable to pay for them — it is too late to control costs after the fact. A total of 42% of respondents to the Uptime Institute Data Center Capacity Trends Survey 2022 cited escalating costs as the top reason for moving workloads from the public cloud back to on-premises infrastructure. Chief information officers face a tricky balancing act when allowing applications to scale to meet business objectives without letting budgets spiral out of control.