How did we reduced the cloud cost by 75%

We have a development team that has been running in Azure and it costs 3.5 times the cost of running VM’s in house on VMware. Cloud provides agility, quick to market and everything at the pace of developer thoughts/needs.

At a high level what are they are using: VM’s, Disks ( Standard, Premium disks ) , AKS ( Azure Kubernetes), Few PAAS services on Azure.

How do we analyze:

This is pretty stright forward, download the cost report of the subscription for the last month. Create a pivot on cost and identify the areas that your spend equals to 90%. In our case, it is the storage and VM’s that consuming 93% of Monthly cost.

Now, the important thing, why we were able to operate with 12 TB in house and development team is using 60 TB in cloud. That explains the choice of disk selection has added a lot of cost. Team went back and reduced the disks from 1 TB to 256 GB or 100 GB and the cost of the disk came back to 3000 $ instead of 10K $ per month.

We also created Azure autimation to scale down the images and shutdown the VM’s during off hours it reduced VM cost to 2500$. With education and making sure that developer and tester understands the selection cost, we were able to reduce the development cost by 75% and made it run at the cost of Internal Datacenter or at the cost of VMware VM’s.

We have lot of other options — like reserved instances, spot instances for production, but keeping agility at core requires better understanding of cloud.

Cloud is a taxi, not a leased car. A better understanding will help both the parties.