Automation is the result of taking a manual task or process and making it automatic with little to no manual intervention. It plays a crucial role in optimizing your cloud spend, as it can be applied to save several hours in various scenarios within your service’s operation.
Here, at CloudZero, discussing automation is no stranger to us. We have information about what automation is and some common tools to help in this guide. We also address how automation isn’t the only thing you need to optimize your cloud costs in this article.
While we understand it isn’t the “one-size-fits-all” solution, we provide some beneficial examples of how you can use automation as a resource in this article.
Examples That Optimize Cloud Spend
There are several options to optimize cloud spend, with automation. In this article, we will address the following five examples:
- Autoscaling
- Cost alerts
- Resource utilization and monitoring
- Resource shut down
- Security vulnerabilities
Autoscaling
A method or service that can automatically detect, add, or remove compute resources needed in a cloud environment or application. Resources can range from cloud hosts, CPUs, load balancers, etc.
It accounts for necessary scaling in events like traffic increases and decreases. This can be programmed via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), or configured via console with major cloud platform services — such as AWS, GCP, and Azure.
These cloud providers offer the following autoscaling services:
- AWS Auto Scaling is offered by AWS
- Managed Instance Groups is offered by Google
- Azure Autoscale and Automatic Scaling are offered by Microsoft
There are various options to apply autoscaling to your cloud computing environments. However, to apply it appropriately without ramping up unnecessary costs you need to have proper monitoring, alerts, and understanding of your use cases.
This will allow you to configure and utilize autoscaling as a tool to mitigate risk and assist in tending to your cloud environments, so you don’t have to keep your eyes on it 24/7.
Cost alerts
Cost alerts are a way to warn or notify you when you have reached cost thresholds or limits that you have configured.
These limits are essential to ensure you do not go over budget and spend allocation, optimizing cloud spend. Alerts can assist in preventing unexpected costs, operational cost predictability, financial design estimates, and anomaly detection.
There are several options available for configuring cost alerts. Many of the major cloud service platforms offer the option to set up alerts to notify you of your costs as they’re ongoing.
There are also third-party platforms, such as CloudZero, which offer anomaly detection alerts that utilize a fully automated AI-powered system that uses your hourly cost spend to predict and detect spikes, in real-time.
More importantly, the integrated AI technology provides amazing features, such as:
- Utilizing your past and real-time data to train itself;
- Providing detailed reporting and visual alerts to narrow down the anomalies detected;
- Giving engineers a powerful tool with a healthy feedback loop to stay on budget during design and operational planning, with cost in mind.
Resource utilization monitoring
All cloud computing resources produce some variation of utilization. That utilization has associated costs, and those can add up. Therefore, adding risk to disrupting your service and creating liability of spending more than you anticipated no matter how much you plan for it.
You can’t predict every scenario but you can plan for it. Utilization monitoring can help with this, and some popular options are:
- AWS CloudWatch
- Azure Monitor
- Google’s Fleet Resource Utilization Metrics
- Grafana
- Splunk
- Elastic Stack (ELK) — to include Kibana, Elasticsearch, Beats and Logstash
Resource shut down
You can shut down resources with autoscaling and other methods. However, it is important to know when to shut down those resources. Adding automation to detect or predict when to shut down resources is important so you aren’t wasting cost.
It can be a lot easier to know when to do this with resources that are in use; but not ones that have been forgotten about because they are no longer used, to only find them by accident.
This is why documenting or tracking resources that are running in your service is key. Some things you can automate to help here are:
- Adding resources automatically to a tracking system;
- Automating scans on your resources to ensure they’re being utilized;
- Alerting you to inspect resources that seem inactive.
Security vulnerabilities
Security vulnerabilities are always a possibility, new ones arise often, and keeping up with them can be daunting. Automating tests and scans is essential to not only detect but also implement fixes. This can be done in several ways but we’ll discuss Host Patch Management and Dependency Management.
Host patch management
Host patch management plays a critical role in optimizing host performance by keeping them up-to-date with improved functionality, firmware updates, and software improvements. They can identify security vulnerabilities, potential environmental risks, and force updates.
To automate this process, you will want to ensure you are validating patches to prevent sideloading; along with scheduling, prioritizing, testing, and deploying them.
You will also want to include documentation around these patches for reference and understanding. All of which, assist in reduced downtime and workflow interruptions within your service.
Dependency management
Dependency management is highly important to keep the dependencies utilized in your programs and services updated. This will not only improve them but can assist in preventing attacks from bad actors.
By reducing the risk of vulnerabilities, dependency management can be done by automating manual processes, such as:
- Policy enforcement
- License compliance
- Building from source
- Validating signatures on packages
- Implementing detection, remediation, recovery, and restoration workflows
Maintaining And Scaling Automation
Maintaining and scaling your automation can be harder to do than initial implementations. Knowing situations that apply will enable easier handling and upkeep.
Automation should be considered in your environment to reduce heavy lifting, saving thousands of developer hours. While it may not always be an option, automation should still be considered with certain indicators.
Some of those indicators include:
- Repetitive or tedious tasks that exhaust your engineering hours;
- Cases where budget overspending is occurring;
- Traffic overloads;
- Reactive situations;
- Resource thresholds and capacities that are being constantly triggered.
Considering all resources involved, dependencies, and workflows are important to maintain automation.
By implementing the aforementioned examples along with proper integration tests, validation tools, and logging mechanisms, you can build robust automation workflows. These workflows will enhance your service, giving you the ability to maintain and scale your automation processes as your service grows while integrating new ones.
Automation Is A Tool
Automation can be an effective tool to optimize your cloud spend, and there are several ways you can do it.
The important thing to keep in mind is that automation is a tool that can optimize your cloud spend, and not an answer to solve all your cloud costs. Like anything, automation can be costly if not designed with maintainability and scalability in mind.
Therefore, it’s important to ensure you are analyzing where automation should be added. By ensuring it is implemented thoughtfully and meticulously, automation can be considered a tool to design thoughtfully while optimizing cloud spend with little effort.
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